Across the eastern seaboard of the United States, from South Carolina to Maine, there is an intense and well-ordered preparation underway to brace against and limit the fallout from Hurricane Irene. In North Carolina, 300,000 people have been ordered to evacuate the Outer Banks and low-lying coastal areas. The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has ordered the first ever mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas in all five boroughs.

New York City evacuations are underway—the first mandatory evacuation in the city’s history. This afternoon, mass transit will be entirely shut down. 370,000 New Yorkers are in the evacuation zone. With a substantial amount of the city expected to be subject to severe flooding if the storm makes a direct hit, the Bloomberg administration is taking care to do everything that was not done in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s arrival in New Orleans.

The highest winds yet recorded were 110 mph, at Cedar Ferry Terminal, North Carolina. MSNBC is reporting that hurricane-force winds are extending 90 miles out from the eye of the storm, even several hours after landfall.

There have been reports of at least one tornado touching down in Maryland, and a federal tornado wach zone now covers eastern parts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey. The latest satellite modeling suggests the storm’s most intense winds will rake the coasts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, hitting New York City with winds in excess of 70 mph. Delaware’s governor has ordered mandatory evacuations.

The state of New Jersey is under a blanket state of emergency, with some coastal areas under mandatory evacuation. The counties are issuing evacuation updates, including official state-backed shelters for evacuees. The NJ Office of Emergency Management has posted pdf documents with advised coastal evacuation routes. New Jersey storm surge maps have also been made available through the Office of Emergency Management.

New Jersey Transit will be entirely shut down as of noon today. New York’s public transit will be shut down at noon, as well. Five New York area airports will be closed, with thousands of flights canceled.

Hospitals and nursing homes are also being evacuated, a first for many of them. Some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions are in the mandatory evacuation zone, including Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, Nomura Securities, RBC Capital Markets and the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Map: Click here for a pdf map of New York City’s mandatory evacuation zones.

Planning: Click here for a pdf guide to hurricane readiness, evacuation and response, for NYC.

This morning, Mayor Bloomberg issued the following statements, with a press release:

“During the storm, please stay off streets and sidewalks to prevent injury, and stay away from the windows if you live on the tenth floor of a high rise or above that. The risk of window damage is greater, so it’d be smart to stay away from the windows or go to a lower floor.

“If the low-lying areas of our city begin to flood, I mentioned the Con Ed may have to shut down their power lines. NYCHA buildings will be shutting down their elevators, as will other buildings. And if you’re using generated power, please do not have a generator inside your house or your apartment. Carbon monoxide fumes kill.

“In terms of our city buildings: All construction has been stopped. Our inspectors are working to make sure that construction sites are locked down.

“Homeowners and residents: If you haven’t done so already, please bring outdoor furniture inside – plywood, trashcans, any loose items that can blow around.

“So in conclusion: If you live in a low-lying Zone A areas or in the Rockaways, you have to leave, and you should start right now. Do not delay. Do not wait for the weather to be bad. It’s starting to rain here in Coney Island right now. This is just the beginning. You say it’s a few drops – this is going to be a very serious storm. No matter what the track is, no matter how much it weakens, this is a life threatening storm to people here.”

The city’s maps and readiness guide are also available in the following ten languages:

An additional 470,000 people live in the mandatory evacuation zones on Long Island, one of the most densely populated areas of the country.

Nassau County: Evacuation notice and resources

Suffolk County: Emergency preparedness resources

Most will likely have to evacuate inland or to official shelters, as New York City’s evacuation procedures and public transit shutdown will make it difficult to get through to the mainland. Some ferries may be able to move people from Long Island’s coastal areas to Connecticut, but these services will shut down when heavy winds and rough seas arrive, if they have not already. Evacuees should check with local authorities and transport services.

Fox 29 Philadelphia is reporting that the 8+ inches of rain expected to hit Philadelphia and New York would be equivalent to more than 60 inches of snow, a measure better understood by residents of the northeast. Some worst-case estimates are for twice that amount of precipitation. The National Hurricane Center is warning that before the storm relents, at least 15 inches of rain are expected to have fallen on North Carolina.

FEMA’s Craig Fugate is warning that tornadoes are expected to accompany the storm, and that anyone outside evacuation zones should remain indoors and keep away from doors and windows. The tornado warnings will last longer than usual, because the risk is tied to the full cyclone.

Storm surges have already been seen in North Carolina, roadways are beginning to see serious flooding, and Fugate also reminded the public that some of the worst floods ever seen came with tropical storms, not hurricanes. Hurricane category ratings are linked to wind-speeds and storm surge projections, not to rain volume.

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Hurricane Emergency Maps for New Jersey:

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New York

Suffolk County links:

• To find a list of open shelters, please click here.
• To find a Red Cross Shelter near you, please click here
• To see the coastal evacuation routes for Suffolk County, click here.
• To see the storm surge zones for Suffolk County, click here.

Nassau County:

• Evacuation notice and list of shelters
• Evacuation routes, maps and instructions
• County evacuation route map

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More links and emergency planning and evacuation resources:

Washington, DC, area

• News releases from the Mayor’s Office
• Follow Mayor Vincent C. Gray on Twitter and Facebook
• Register for Alert DC

• DDOT website information and on Twitter
• DPW website information and on Twitter
• HSEMA and 72hours.dc.gov
• DISB provides flood insurance information and tips on storm recovery
• MPD website information
• DCOA offers tips for preparing
• Evacuation route planning tool

Federal Government

• Ready.gov – hurricane preparedness and response resources
• NOAA Watch – tracking maps for Hurricane Irene
• National Hurricane Center – Hurricane Irene Public Advisory
• NOAA / NHC - Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook

Most of the Republican candidates for their party’s presidential nomination debated last night in Iowa, two days ahead of the crucial Ames Straw Poll, thought to be a leading indicator of which candidates are credible and which are less likely to win in January. Rick Perry, who has not yet announced his candidacy, was not in attendance, and Fred Karger—who met all the criteria for attendance—was not allowed to participate, some say because he is openly gay.

The questions were direct, tough and probing. Challenged on her claim that she could turn the US economy around in just three months, Michelle Bachmann fielded the first of many tough questions. She backtracked somewhat, claiming that she could not fix the economy in three months, but that she could enact policies that could eventually have a positive impact. She then trailed off into a “one term president” rant against Obama, which opened her to the critique that her policy plans lack substance.

Mitt Romney attempted to deliver an economic-policy stump speech. He launched into a Republican talking point, calling for a steep reduction in “corporate tax rates”, which are either the lowest in the industrialized world or the highest, depending how they are defined. He called for energy independence, suggesting new drilling, but not openly saying so, and vaguely said we need “the rule of law” to shore up our economy.

Romney’s reference to “rule of law” struck many as odd and off-topic, in part because the Obama record has been one of trying to force major corporate interests to follow existing law and end the regulatory non-action of the Bush years. But Romney’s meaning was far more likely to be about taxes: he has been facing criticism for having “raised taxes” while governor of Massachusetts, but has said he was able to bring in “new revenues” by “closing loopholes”, i.e. enforcing the law.

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty got off to a very rocky start, showing either plain ignorance of active government policy and recent political history or a willingness to tell very big fibs in order to make difficult rhetorical points—alleging that Barack Obama has never presented a plan to reform Medicare. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—which Pawlenty likes to call “Obamneycare”—included Medicare reform specifically designed to cut $500 billion of “waste, fraud and abuse” from Medicare, without reducing benefits or access to care.

In fact, while it achieves those cost savings, it also establishes that no insurance managers, public or private sector, can interfere with doctor-patient decisions on appropriate course of treatment. So Pawlenty missed the mark dramatically, while saying little about his own plan, getting the facts wrong and leading research-minded voters to look up Obama’s already in place and very specific Medicare reform plan. The president has called for an expansion of that reform plan, again without cutting benefits.

Rick Santorum announced his plan to “cut the corporate tax rate to zero, for manufacturers”, and he did so with a smile, as if anticipating major new corporate financing for his campaign. Santorum seemed eager, throughout the night, to glisten with new ideas of this kind which he hoped would capture new support and new momentum, going into Saturday’s straw poll.

Chris Wallace—who consistently asked aggressive, difficult questions—asked Pawlenty if Bachmann was really unqualified, as he had claimed, and had no achievements, but he added the quip that Pawlenty might be attacking her simply because “she’s beating you in the polls”. Pawlenty repeated that her record is simply lacking, that she has no accomplishments at all as a legislator.

Referring to the Bachmann’s catch-line that she has a “titanium spine” and will never relent on her ideological demands, Pawlenty said “It’s not her spine we’re interested in; it’s her record of achievement.” He then addressed her directly, saying “If that’s your view of leadership with effective results, please stop, because you’re killing us,” implying that by sabotaging deals that get much of what Republicans seek, she is losing the wider policy war for the party.

Romney faced his toughest question when he was challenged on his record at Bain Capital, which acquired American Paper, closed two plants, and imposed 2,000 layoffs. Romney says not all of the companies Bain invested in while he was there worked, and so some had to fail. He sought to paint this record of experience as an education in what works to allow businesses to grow and create jobs, but he offered no specifics on how that education would play out in presidential policy.

Wallace asked Gingrich if his record on the campaign trail—top advisers resigning en masse—shows he is not fit for the presidency. Gingrich bristled and decried what he called “gotcha questions”. He criticized the press corps generally, for focusing on “campaign minutia” and ignoring the basic ideas that distinguish Republicans from Pres. Obama.

He made the most specific policy suggestion of the evening, saying the government should make “Lean Six Sigma”—a combination of Toyota’s Lean manufacturing model and Motorola’s Six Sigma production process—the national manufacturing standard.

He asked Huntsman if his record of service as Barack Obama’s representative to China means he is not a true Republican. He said he is proud to serve and that when your country calls, you step up and serve. Huntsman repeated throughout the night that he is proud of his record of public service and that he believes that experience is the best sign that he is prepared to be president.

Herman Cain was asked if his extreme statements—like calling on communities to ban mosques—and saying he knew little about the war in Afghanistan made him too ignorant to be president. Cain seemed to agree with Gingrich’s critique of unfair questions, and said he has learned, that as a businessman he knows the ability to learn and to develop more complex understanding of such complex issues makes a good leader.

On immigration, Cain said legal immigration is the already existing and appropriate “path to citizenship”. In what might be his most memorable remark of the campaign, he artfully threaded the needle of ethnic and ideological tensions relating to immigration, saying “America can be a nation with high fences and wide open doors.”

Gingrich took an extreme tack to the hard right, calling for moving millions of people to the southern states to police the borders, the establishment of English as “the official language of government”—a radical position that ignores the First Amendment and holds that we will not inform anyone who does not understand English of their rights, or what they may need to do in an emergency.

Gingrich also added that he would “distinguish between people who have been here a very long time and people who have come more recently”. This last comment seemed to some to mean he would allow for something like amnesty for those who have been here longer, while others were chilled by what seemed to be a nativist rejection of immigrants’ rights.

Romney was asked about how he used new revenues to fix the Massachusetts state budget, and whether he would raise taxes to balance the budget. By simple arithmetic, it looks nearly impossible to balance the federal budget any time soon without raising taxes, but Romney defended his record in Massachusetts, explaining that he balanced the budget every year, and that he only needed to close loopholes, not to raise taxes, while imposing sharp cuts.

Pawlenty was asked about his having increased the cigarette tax in his state, in order to balance the budget. He made reference to whether it was a “fee” or a “tax” and to court rulings on the subject, and said he would later regret having done it, but it seemed clear that this was instrumental to his budget policy and a sticking point that could be to his favor or to his disadvantage, depending on whether GOP primary voters include the majority of Republicans who favor raising revenues to balance the budget.

Bachmann said she had opposed the cigarette tax hike, when she was in the state legislature, and that she was determined not to support it. But she did in fact vote to increase the cigarette tax. She claimed Pawlenty forced her to do so, by attaching a rider that would “protect the rights of the unborn”, so that she was forced to choose between voting against rights for the unborn and voting to raise taxes.

Bachmann said her view was that you can get things wrong when it comes to money but not when it comes to life. The exchange, however, seemed to play into Pawlenty’s argument, that he is better at getting results than Bachmann, who is a hapless prisoner to her own ideological priorities, and who—despite this, and contrary to what she says—will vote against her principles.

Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania, appeared to agree with Pawlenty’s critique of Bachmann, saying that a leader needs to know how to get a good deal and get results. Santorum sought to tout his record of “leadership” at the state and federal level, and argued that he was better able to serve the conservative ideals than Bachmann, because he knows how to negotiate.

When the question was posed if the candidates felt so strongly about opposing any increase of any kind in tax rates, would they oppose even a deficit reduction deal that made $10 in cuts for every $1 in new revenues, every member of the debate panel raised their hands. After-debate analysis suggested this moment may become “iconic”, indicating that the Republican party is only interested in tax cuts, not in deficit reduction, fiscal responsibility or protecting Medicare and Social Security.

The image of the Republican candidates dutifully—some with reluctance—raising their hands to support Grover Norquist’s radical anti-tax pledge could become the signal moment of the primary campaign, when Republican candidates announced their intention to enforce the tea party radical position of obstructing deficit reduction in order to prioritize tax breaks, at a time of historically low tax rates, perilously low revenues and escalating debt.

Santorum took issue with Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann’s reference to the 10th Amendment, and the question of states’ rights, saying their theories were “the 10th Amendment run amok”, and that “Our country is based on moral laws, ladies and gentlemen. Abraham Lincoln said the states don’t have the right to do wrong.” It was a moment of passion and principle that stood out, but which will require Santorum to make clear how he would deal with issues like same-sex marriage or abortion, where prevailing law conflicts with his views.

Asked about the entrance of Rick Perry into the race, Ron Paul said Perry “represents the status quo” and that he will make Paul’s own unique views stand out more. Herman Cain agreed, saying Perry would dilute the vote for “politicians” and make his business record stand out. Bachmann said there is room for another conservative in the race, though many strategists believe Perry will cut into her vote-getting ability.

Newt Gingrich was asked if he has a clear vision of what should be done in Libya, after taking two diametrically opposing views within a few days, at the start of the conflict. He said he recently spoke to Gen. Abizaid, who speaks Arabic, is one of the foremost security policy experts on the region, and who said we have a “strategic deficit” that needs to be closed through intelligent, persistent diplomatic engagement.

In what is perhaps an interesting angle, politically, Abizaid has been a supporter of the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts in the region, which taken with Gingrich’s characterization of the state of affairs, suggests the Obama administration’s policies are potentially closing that deficit.

Gingrich did not offer a clear policy position on the current situation in Libya, but complained that the press were criticizing him for Pres. Obama’s having coordinated a humanitarian crisis response in Libya.

Huntsman was asked what it meant that China has been hacking into US corporations and US government servers. He said he has long experience with China, and believes the United States needs to have a robust, informed, collaborative and secure relationship with the rising world power. He also said it would be naïve to expect China not to behave like a rival, and that we nee a president who understands the relationship.

Ron Paul decried sanctions against Iran, saying that military threats and sanctions are precursors to real military conflict, costly policy mistakes and would only worsen the security situation worldwide. Paul believes that foreign wars that are not of absolute defensive necessity are contrary to democratic values, undermine the principles of liberty and create enmities that would continue to threaten US interests far into the future.

Cain was asked by Wallace about his comment that US energy independence would be the best way to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The suggestion was that it might be irrational to claim that drilling for oil in North America would persuade Iran’s hardline regime not to develop nuclear weapons. Cain explained that he views economic policy as one element of a complex foreign policy, where economic pressures can be brought to bear to incentivize the behavior of even extreme governments.

When Ron Paul was asked why he disagreed with Michelle Bachmann’s view that accused terrorists should not have due process rights, he said “she turns our rule of law on its head.” Paul explained that for individuals accused of terrorist activity to be treated as terrorists, “They have to be ruled a terrorist. Who rules them a terrorist?” He said the Constitution requires due process and a court ruling based on evidence. Bachmann, he said, is rejecting the rule of law and the traditions of American democracy, instead proposing “mob rule”.

Santorum said that under the regime of the Shah, the Iranian people were “free”—disregarding the police state, disappearances and torture used by that regime. He then complained that the “mullocracy” in Tehran “tramples the rights of gays”—a remark that surprised many, given his relentless pursuit of a national ban on same-sex marriage.

Gingrich was asked why he proposed a “loyalty test” for any Muslim that might serve in his administration. He said he would impose a loyalty test on every person who would serve in government, but gave no specifics as to how that test would be carried out. He cited incidents of Cold War espionage, where people that seemed above suspicion turned out to be foreign spies, and one case where an alleged terrorist conspirator said he “lied” when asked how he could take an oath of loyalty and then behave as America’s enemy.

Herman Cain was asked what it was he believes southerners “find objectionable about Mormonism”? He said that he, personally, has no problem with it, but that he believes many southerners simply don’t understand how Mormonism fits into the culture of protestant Christianity that they are familiar with.

Asked about her having said she hated her husband’s idea that she should study tax law, “But the Lord said, be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands,” Rep. Bachmann seemed genuinely embarrassed and stunned. She paused for an uncomfortable length of time, then offered the explanation that she meant by this term “respect” and that her husband respects her as well.

Romney may have waded into waters that will hurt him in the general election, when he shed the moderate tone of his campaign, saying “our marriage status relationship should be consistent at the national level” and he supported a national law to define marriage as between a man and a woman. He justified this by expressing concern that some same sex couples might have a hard time divorcing if they are in states that have different marriage laws from those where they married.

Huntsman supports civil unions, and spoke of “reciprocal beneficiary rights”. He said “I believe in traditional marriage, but subordinate to that, I believe that we haven’t done a good enough job at equality.” This helped to define Huntsman’s position as the true moderate conservative in the field, and a pragmatist. Many critics have been wary of the conservative candidates’ unwillingness to admit that any injustice could be in need of correction that does not need conservative ideological solutions.

Paul took a position that many find hard to grasp, given his arch-libertarian tendencies. He said “just so long as they don’t impose their vision of marriage on you”, that his priority was to ensure that no one had their private life defined by the government. This was in line with his libertarian principles, but he also specified that he believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, a concession to the conservative ideology he is known for criticizing.

Bachmann offered the awkward statement that “I have an absolutely unblemished record when it comes to this issue of man-woman marriage”. She has not supported same-sex marriage, certainly, but there have been questions about “blemishes” to her record, including alleged support for the extreme and discredited “treatment” option of prayer to cure homosexuality. Questions have also been raised about whether she and her husband have been spokespeople for this policy.

Romney may have made his most significant slip-up of the night—in line with his statement the previous day that “corporations are people”—when he said that “We’ve got to find a way to reduce our spending on a lot of anti-poverty programs”. He said this in responding to a question about whether he would extend unemployment benefits.

Romney has sought to blame both general economic pathologies and the president’s policy response for prolonged unemployment, which would suggest those who are suffering the impact are not in any way responsible for their predicament, so his admonition that in times of economic hardship the government should roll back its anti-poverty efforts seemed more than a bit awkward.

He said he would “go to Congress with a new plan for unemployment benefits”, but that he would not extend the current program of unemployment benefits. He was not pressed on what he would do should Congress fail to give him the option he prefers.

Huntsman took issue with the regulatory system and made what might be his most immoderate policy assertion of the night, saying that “If you want to build a facility in this country, you can’t, because of the EPA’s regulatory reign of terror“. He was defending the Huntsman company’s chemical operations, and by implication was suggesting chemical plants need more leeway to release dangerous toxins into the environment.

The use of the phrase “reign of terror”—a reference to the French revolutionary period and a campaign of torture and mass execution of “enemies of the revolution”—echoed the much maligned rhetoric of bloodshed and exaggeration increasingly used by Republicans since the summer of 2008, and through the 2010 elections. Huntsman did not backtrack, but repeated his allegation of a “reign of terror”, without giving any specifics about how that “terror” was imposed.

Newt Gingrich was asked to explain why he does not favor Ron Paul’s demand that the Federal Reserve Bank be “abolished”. “Having some sort of central bank”, he said, is necessary for dealing with the money supply “in the modern world”. He added, “I think the fact that the Fed is secret is a scandal” and repeated his demand that the Federal Reserve Bank be audited, that its books be open to public scrutiny.

Ron Paul celebrated what he called an awakening of the mainstream to the need to audit the Fed, but said we need to phase out the Fed, and that it is important to “understand the business cycle” in order to prevent recessions.

On education, Huntsman was firm, saying “No Child Left Behind hasn’t worked for this country; it ought to be done away with.” He called for a greater emphasis on governance at the local level, and said there is no one so interested in schools succeeding as the communities they serve. Herman Cain seconded this response, saying he would abandon NCLB and focus on local control of schools.

Huntsman added that he stood against letting the nation default, because the United States is 25% of the world’s GDP and by far the largest financial services industry in the world. This was a critique of the radical factions in his party, including Bachmann, who have said that they believe default could be beneficial for long-term fiscal solvency, acting as a kind of spur to activate serious budget reform.

The debate showed new rifts between and among the candidates and allowed them to stake out certain clear positions: Gingrich emerged as the “ideas” candidate, demanding that everyone focus more on ideas and less on rhetoric, style and the “minutia” of what goes on along the campaign trail. Romney sought to remain largely above the fray, and managed to do so, but gave few specifics. Ron Paul staked out a position of radical reform, in language many voters support.

Herman Cain talked up his business record, but mostly offered what he considered common-sense ideas. Rick Santorum promised bold leadership, offered some radical positions on taxation, and confounded some of the most problematic critiques of his ideas. Huntsman stood as the principled moderate, and a conservative problem solver.

Bachmann was on the defensive, but was poised; she moderated some of her most hardline views, but gave few specifics. Pawlenty became something of an attacker, and began what could be the most effective argument for his campaign: getting things done. It was not clear if anyone “won” the debate, though Romney, Bachmann and Gingrich were all given praise for their demeanor, for different reasons. Pawlenty may have made a dent in Bachmann’s armor, however, and some now expect him to be a tougher campaigner.

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Report and analysis from Independents of Principle

The stock market is a driver of economic activity, not a mood ring

It has become a standard of political and economic commentary that the stock market is a “reflection” of the general economic mood or of wider economic health and wellbeing. It is not. The stock market is not a mood ring and it was not designed to be. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow/DJIA) was not designed to stand alone as an economic indicator, but rather as part of a fabric of tools and analyses that would, taken together, give a more insightful, more complete picture of generalized economic balance.

Specifically, the Dow was designed to measure the stability and progress of major industrial corporations—a narrow but highly relevant interest within a much wider pool of economic interests. And there are numerous examples of the stock market’s divorce from economic and political reality, which makes sense, because it is not focused on the whole economy, but rather on what investors can do with a certain subset of economic interests.

During the 1930s, to take an extreme example, numerous Wall Street firms fought to avoid national divestment from Nazi Germany, so they could continue to profit from the regime’s aggressive military build-up and industrial expansion; they were on the wrong side of history, and they opposed the war, because  they believed it ran counter to their narrow profit interests. Their vision of what was economically sound was, to be polite, deeply flawed.

In fairness, not everyone on Wall Street shared that narrowly interested view, but that the flawed metrics of what was economically or politically wise, what was in the nation’s best interests, and what served the national interest of maintaining a vibrant, free democracy, intervened in the calculus of some firms, for some years, is not in dispute.

For much of the last decade, Wall Street’s top banks actively modeled, incentivized and promoted a business model whereby insurers were rewarded for failure to provide insurance or to hold down costs—their two reasons for being. They also modeled, incentivized and promoted “toxic” derivatives that could never have yielded what was promised and which brought about the near collapse of the global financial system.

We do not hear much in the way of self-criticism or public apology for the intense commitment to gravely mistaken investment priorities. We do not hear the major firms on Wall Street urging their current managers, clients and/or lobbyists, to reverse the gravely mistaken interpretation of reality, whereby anything that could “generate profit” could be justified and consequences—some very serious and very foreseeable—were largely ignored or obscured.

The myth of the stock market protest vote—”the market is reacting negatively to express its displeasure”—is very specifically part of a refusal to take responsibility for the active role the stock market’s leading agents play in motivating economic activity. The market’s failure to perform is partly—to be fair—related to economic factors, partly related to the financial maneuvering of investors and the traders who represent them, but it is also partly attributable to what is, at the end of the day, the market’s own failure to perform.

The “mood ring” myth is a way of deflecting blame: We have not failed; we have not lost money; we did not make bad judgments—the world did it to us.

That is not the picture of an institution at the height of its relevance or the peak of its abilities. It is the kind of attitude that arises in an atmosphere of irresponsibility, confusion, misrepresentation and flawed logic. The complexity of high-risk derivatives has been widely talked up as a key source of confusion leading to poor judgment across the financial services sector. But others have argued there was deliberate obfuscation involved, rooted in a belief that as long as it was never understood that there might not be any substance to some of those products, they would not collapse.

That’s not to say that everyone in finance was engaged in a sordid criminal conspiracy. It is more a problem of access, responsibility and attitudes: for one, there is too much automatic trading built into the financial sector, so human agents do less of the thinking for each trade than used to be the case. This limits access—to information, to the reasoning behind trading trends, and to corrective measures—and it expands the territory for the spread of the attitude that the market is not responsible for what happens in connections with its activities.

Today’s stock market makes almost incomprehensible volumes of automatic trading, managed by computers using advanced algorithms to judge what is sold or bought and when—not always with any deep human intellectual examination of the real promise or risk inherent in the enterprises, or even the sector, in question.

Glenn Hall, editor in chief of The Street, wrote last week that:

Machines don’t understand the responsibilities of ownership. They obviously don’t care about the fundamentals behind the numbers or understand the power of responsible and responsive corporate leadership.

Beyond that, what’s wrong with high-tech trading? In my opinion, it’s too fast and too stupid. I like to think humans are smart enough to avoid a massive selloff like we had yesterday, when there was no particular news or event that merited such a drop.

Hall cites Doug Kass as observing that “high-frequency-trading funds are very active and have taken the role as the dominant investor in the U.S. stock market. The market’s spastic action reflects, in part, the disproportionate role of high-frequency-trading funds on the market over the past few weeks.”

An July 2010 article by Matt Krantz, published in USA Today, warned that computerized trading was now dominating overall stock trading activity:

Most of those trades aren’t coming from trigger-happy day traders and mutual fund managers with billions of dollars at their disposal. It’s a flood of machine-gun speed fury coming from an army of computers programmed to obey complicated algorithms that are hyperactively buying and selling.

What does that mean to you, the individual investor? The next time you buy or sell a stock, forget the quaint idea that there is a living, breathing human being on the other side of the transaction. You’re trading with a computer.

Not only are the markets completely computerized, more than half of the market’s volume is churned by computers programmed to spot certain patterns in trading. These machines see stocks not as securities used by companies to raise money, but rather, symbols, numbers and bits that are traded, swapped and exchanged.

And now, traders say, humans are responding to machines rather than the other way around. Increasingly, too, the machines are reacting to each other, trying to second-guess what their next moves might be on how to take advantage of an edge that might be gone in milliseconds.

That automaticity takes much of the intelligence out of the stock market, but it also demonstrates the extent to which the market is not a mood ring and does not serve as some sort of game theory real-time poll of the nation’s economic attitudes, health status or even prevailing trend lines.

The stock market is not, and cannot be, a reflection of the human-scale economic landscape, because it is specifically designed to be an abstract realm in which abstract values are traded, and where profit is to be gained from gambling on the trends in those numbers, not in the long-term economic relevance or resiliency of a particular enterprise.

There are now thousands of different automated “trading systems”, each looking to predict, trace and capitalize on trends that may have little to do with the long-term economic promise or viability of a given financial product. It is the zealous pursuit of automatic wealth creation that cuts off stock trading and the financial services sector from the rest of the economy, and gives us such deeply flawed metrics and such inexplicable trading variations.

There are important differences between stocks and bonds, of course, and the two often comprise opposing and complementary trends for major investment, but it is worth noting that while stocks plunged in value after the S&P downgrade, the bonds themselves hit record demand, suggesting the S&P finding was very much off the mark.

There is informational confusion in the financial services sector, at the moment, and this is due to, more than anything else, the persistent and pervasive disconnect between the present day realm of high finance and the overall economy. We need to forget about the idea that the market rises and falls as a commentary on the events of the day, and get back to a model whereby human beings plan and commit to investments that make sense, because they have real economic promise on their side.

In order to win support from radical Tea Party freshmen, most of whom voted against the legislation anyway, Congressional leaders imposed stiff new tax penalties on radiate students across the country. Specifically, subsidized loans for grad students were cut—the government provides all student loans, so this effectively eliminates funding for post-graduate education—and a tax credit for borrowers who repay student loans on time for 12 consecutive months was eliminated.

The tax credit eliminated costs far less than the massive subsidies going to oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power companies, yet the Tea Party freshmen, who have touted their opposition to any and every tax increase, did nothing to oppose the tax hikes on students. And while the tax credits may be much smaller than fossil fuel subsidies, or nuclear, eliminating them will cost far more.

Eliminating the on-time repayment credit will reduce the likelihood of on-time repayment significantly, potentially costing the government billions, over time, as well as subjecting more borrowers to fines and fees, depleting their personal economic footprint, and serving as a drag on growth.

The logic is simply astonishing: while the radical anti-tax Tea Partiers, backed by billionaire partisans, claim as an article of faith the absolute truth that any and all tax cuts incentivize the wealthy to create jobs—though we have ten years of evidence this is often not the case—, they reject the idea that a direct cash incentive for repayment will pay off—despite the evidence that it does.

In fact, the particular kind of tax increase the Tea Partiers have demanded and are supporting is more costly and will exacerbate not only budget shortfalls but also the negative economic trends whereby the American people are unnecessarily disadvantaged in the face of far more powerful economic forces.

Allegations that the so-called Tea Party caucus has degenerated into little more than a lobby for the wealthy interests that back them gain credibility when they support tax hikes on the vulnerable, and which will have a direct negative impact on the middle class. It should be well understood by all: the House Tea Party Republicans have pushed for and supported—the anti-student provisions in the failed Republican-only House bills were far worse—tax hikes that will make college more expensive and eat way at middle class wealth.

List of Legislative Riders on H.R.2584, The Interior & Environment Approps bill for FY12
39 provisions in the bill specifically eliminate environmental protections in service of big polluters and GOP campaign donors

*In order as they appear in the bill, with section numbers cited.

Blocks Endangered Species Act Designations [Language on page 8]: Prohibits funding for Endangered Species Act listings or critical habitat designations.

Blocks NPS Boat Checks on Yukon River [Section 116]: Prohibits the National Park Service from carrying out boat inspection or safety checks on the Yukon River within the Yukon-Charley National Preserve in Alaska.

Blocks Agency Appeal of Grazing on Public Lands [Section 118]: Amends administrative appeal procedures for grazing on public lands to require parties to exhaust all administrative appeals before they may file suit in Federal Court.

Blocks Judicial Review of De-listing Wolves in Wyoming/Great Lakes [Section 119]: Protects from judicial review any decision of the Secretary of the Interior to de-list wolves in Wyoming or the Great Lakes region.

Blocks NEPA Review of Livestock Movement across Public Lands [Section 120]: Provides that for FY 2012 through FY 2014 the movement of livestock across public lands shall not be subject to NEPA review.

Requires BOEMRE Oil & Gas Permit Reporting [Section 121]: Requires Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement to keep detailed records and provide quarterly reports on any oil and gas permit or plan that was not approved by the agency.

Blocks Wild Lands Secretarial Order [Section 124]: Prohibits funding for the Wild Lands Secretarial Order announced by Interior Secretary Salazar last December. Proponents of the Secretarial Order argue that the Order is a reiteration of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 requirements for BLM management of federal lands with wilderness characteristics.

Allows for Export of Alaskan Western Cedar [Section 414]: Allows Alaskan western red cedar and yellow cedar to be sold for export. Current law requires such cedar to be used domestically.

Blocks NEPA Review of Extended Grazing Permits [Section 415]: Allows grazing permits to be extended without the required NEPA review in FY 2012 through FY 2016. In prior year’s appropriations, the extension of grazing permits was only for one year.

Extension of Forest Service Stewardship Program [Section 427]: Allows the Forest Service stewardship contracting program which under current law does not expire until September 30, 2013 to be extended through September 30, 2023.

Blocks Livestock Emissions Regulation [Section 428]: Prohibits funds for the promulgation or implementation of any regulation requiring a permit for emissions resulting from the biological processes of livestock production.

Blocks Greenhouse Gas Rule on Manure Management [Section 429]: Prohibits EPA from implementing a rule requiring reporting of greenhouse gases from manure management systems.

Blocks Greenhouse Gas Rule on Stationary Sources [Section 431]: Severely limits EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. For a one-year period EPA is prohibited from proposing or promulgating regulations to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from stationary sources. The language also prevents civil tort or common law lawsuits during this one-year period. Furthermore the language states that any permit applied for during the one-year period shall not be federally enforceable.

Blocks Update to Mountaintop Removal Mining Rule [Section 432]: Prohibits the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) from updating the Stream Buffer Rule. This is for the benefit of companies engaged in Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Blocks Mountaintop Removal Mining Policy at Multiple Agencies [Sec. 433]: Prohibits EPA, the Corps of Engineers, and OSM from implementing or enforcing any policy or procedure contained in two specified documents on Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Blocks Coal Ash Regulation [Section 434]: Prohibits EPA from regulating Fossil Fuel Combustion Waste (coal ash) under the Solid Waste Disposal Act.

Blocks Modification of Clean Water Act [Sec. 435]: Prohibits EPA from changing or supplementing guidance or rules related to the scope of the Clean Water Act.

Blocks Clean Water Act Regulations on Cooling Water Intake Structures [Section 436]: Prohibits EPA from developing, finalizing, implementing, or enforcing rules for facilities with cooling water intake structures.

Limiting Public Appeals [Section 437]: Changes the general administrative appeal process for the Forest Service to the less rigorous one contained in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003.

Blocks Storm Water Discharge Regulations [Section 439]: Prohibits regulations or guidance that would expand the storm water discharge program under the Clean Water Act to post-construction commercial or residential properties until after the EPA administrator submits a study to the Appropriations and authorizing Committees. The study must include overall cost as well as a cost-benefit analysis for various options.

Financial Break for Big Mining Companies [Section 440]: Amends the 1993 law establishing the Hardrock Mining Claim Maintenance Fee to provide a financial break for placer claims held by an association of two or more persons.

Allows for Texas’ Cap-and-Trade System [Section 441]: Provides that the EPA shall take no action to disapprove or prevent implementation of any flexible air permitting program. This provision was for the benefit of the State of Texas.

Blocks Grazing Management of Bighorn Sheep [Section 442]: Provides that through FY 2016 no action can be taken to manage Bighorn Sheep if such action would result in a reduction in the number of livestock allowed to graze upon a parcel.

Waives Clean Air Act Requirements for Big Oil Companies [Section 443]: Amends the Clean Air Act to (1) preclude EPA from requiring offshore sources to demonstrate compliance with health-based air quality standards anywhere but in a single onshore area; (2) reduce the length of time during which exploration platforms and drill ships are considered emission sources under the CAA, thereby limiting the time when emissions would be controlled; (3) make it impossible to use the permitting program to set emission control requirements for service vessels associated with offshore sources; and (4) replace a relatively fast, inexpensive process for citizens to challenge government action with a longer, more expensive review process in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This legislation passed the House on June 22, 2011 by a vote of 253-166.

Blocks Arsenic Cancer Study & Formaldehyde Risk Assessments [Section 444]: New authorization language requiring EPA to improve its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) seeking to draw doubt to the program that highlights health implications from environmental contaminants. The language stops the release of draft or final risk assessments that are not based on improvements in IRIS based on a National Research Council assessment of formaldehyde. Further requires the National Academy of Science to review EPA’s changes to IRIS and review risk assessments undertaken by EPA. The language goes on to limit funds for any action that would lower exposure levels below or within background concentration levels in ambient air, drinking water, soil, or sediment. Report language directs EPA to take no further action to post its draft cancer assessment of inorganic arsenic until the completion of the NAS study.

Removes Protection of Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining Claims [Section 445]: Prohibits the Secretary of the Interior from implementing a land withdrawal to protect the Grand Canyon from new uranium mining claims.

Blocks Forest Service Travel Management: [Section 446]: Prohibits the Forest Service from implementing Travel Management Plans in California until completion of an assessment of unauthorized routes. It further limits the classification of certain forest roads.

Blocks EPA Opinions on Pesticides [Section 447]: Prevents the EPA from using biological opinions related to pesticides and the Endangered Species Act, with a focus on ESA-listed salmon.

Blocks Clean Air Act Regulations of Cement Industry [Section 448]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to implement Clean Air Act regulations on the manufacture of Portland cement.

Blocks EPA Enforcement of Florida Water Quality Standards [Section 452]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to implement or enforce numeric Florida Water Quality Standards even though the state receives millions in federal funds for water projects.

Blocks EPA Greenhouse Gas Standard for Automobiles [Section 453]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop or finalize a new greenhouse gas standard for automobiles after model year 2016.

Blocks Clean Air Act Regulations of Fine Particles/Soot [Section 454]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to regulate certain levels of particulate matter in the air under the Clean Air Act.

Blocks EPA Regulation of Hard Rock Mining Operations [Section 455]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop additional financial assurance requirements for hard rock mining operations.

Requires BLM Notification of Land Exchanges [Section 458]: Amends the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 to require BLM and the Forest Service to provide written notification of land exchanges to adjacent landowners.

Blocks EPA Funds to Great Lake States due to Ballast Water Requirements [Section 459]: Prohibits certain Great Lakes states from receiving any EPA funding if they have adopted ballast water requirements that are more stringent than Coast Guard requirements. The Coast Guard believes this will block at least four Great Lake States from receiving any EPA funds.

Blocks EPA Guidelines on Misleading Pesticide Labels [Section 460]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to finalize guidelines on misleading information provided on pesticide labels.

Blocks Fictitious EPA Action on Ammonia Emissions[Section 461]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop or implement regulations related to ammonia emissions under the secondary standard for NOx and SOx.   EPA has already stated that it has no intention of doing so.

Blocks Clean Air Rules for Power Plants and Requires a Study That Ignores Public Health Benefit of the Clean Air Act [Section 462]: Directs the EPA to do a cumulative assessment of the impacts of EPA regulations, and prohibits funding for the “Utility MACT” and “Transport” rules.

Blocks Permit Requirements for Pesticide Discharge in Waterways [Title V]: Amends the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Clean Water Act to eliminate requirements for chemical companies and agriculture to obtain permits for pesticides entering waterways.

• From the Democratic minority of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations

While House and Senate leaders are now moving away from Pres. Obama’s $4 trillion debt deal, proposing far less in real long-term debt and deficit reduction, Standard and Poors is threatening to downgrade the nation’s credit rating for bond sales. The rating agency is demanding $4 trillion in deficit reduction, calling for a plan that will put the debt trajectory on a “sustainable path”.

The Boehner plan, which aims for $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, with the possibility of $1.8 trillion later, will not meet the S&P standard for sustainable deficits. The Reid plan, which calls for $2.7 trillion in spending cuts, also falls short, but is thought to operate in part on the assumption that some of the Bush tax cuts will expire next year, leading to at least $1 trillion in additional revenue.

Pres. Obama is caught in a difficult spot, as he will likely have to sign whatever emerges from Congress, or else take unilateral action under the so-called constitutional option (Article II, bolstered by the 14th Amendment). He is almost certain to use any Congressional failure to bring in new revenues as grounds for an aggressive campaign to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

But that is not certain to calm concerns at credit rating agencies about the solvency of the American government, in terms of meeting its bond-repayment obligations. There is also the problem of collateral economic damage, which will further slow revenue growth and put still more pressure on the government’s ability to repay.

What seems clear at this stage, as the Congressional switchboard is overwhelmed with calls and web servers are crashing, is that the Boehner plan falls desperately short of what is required, and is unlikely to win support in the Senate. Reid’s plan is also insufficient, and sure to alienate much of the Democratic party’s base, by not asking for any new revenues to complement the massive proposed spending cuts.

Observers have expressed dismay and amazement at the slow pace of negotiations, with Speaker Boehner quitting negotiations last Thursday evening, and scheduling no vote for his new plan, which essentially rules out any compromise, until Wednesday at the earliest, leaving just three business days before default and virtually guaranteeing a credit downgrade, whatever final agreement is made.

When comedians are keeping watch over the deliberate falsehoods dispensed by “mainstream media”, there is something rotten in the culture of our free press. Not because comedians shouldn’t do that work—all citizens should—but because the mainstream media should be committed, at every level, to truth-telling and citizenship. Fox News, in light of the bribery, spying and coercion, scandal engulfing its parent company, has definitively shown how far from that mission its news operation is.

Despite engaging in radical, unfounded and coordinated ideologically-driven crusades against organizations that foster unbiased, non-partisan citizenship and service to the American people, despite its adopting tabloid-style tactics for TV news reporting, despite its relentless accusations, smears and borderline hate speech, against the nation’s chief executive, Fox News is now defending pervasive criminality at News Corp.’s UK tabloids and accusing unbiased media of “piling on” and blowing the scandal out of proportion.

For the record, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, and his son, James, were called to testify before a select committee of the British Parliament, regarding mounting evidence of a pervasive campaign, over many years, at multiple News Corp. publications, to bribe public officials, illegally spy on innocent civilians, and harass and—according to some reports—intimidate members of the government.

That testimony was anomalous, in part because of the commitment to a free and independent press. But, it was necessary, because the information coming to light so far, throughout years of this developing scandal, suggest there has been a concerted effort to conceal information, kill investigations and use personal, political and commercial influence to obscure the truth. The prime minister of the United Kingdom was forced to extend the current session of Parliament, cut short a trip to Africa, and answer questions about his own personal and professional involvement with key figures involved in the tabloids’ illegal spying.

But Fox News, which has long established its faith-position that all media who do not devoutly, blindly and without remorse, uphold and promote specific tenets of right-wing ideology, are not “balanced” and are in fact part of a vile—use any adjective that fits the animus of the moment (“left-wing”, “communist”, “socialist”, “jihadist”, “terrorist”)—conspiracy to destroy America. Women who claim that women should have rights and privileges of citizenship equal to men are compared to Nazis; Democrats, and the tens of millions of voters that support them, are compared to terrorists and mass murderers.

The level of irrational vitriol and single-party bias at Fox News is now so legendary that around the world, including in tabloid-soaked Great Britain, there is an openly professed fear among public officials and journalists that something as insidious and corrosive as Fox News might emerge there. Laws designed to protect freedom of the press actually include specific provisions designed to reduce the likelihood of the kind of concentration-of-power and intimidation agenda that many believe is the corporate mission at Fox News.

But that aside, the issue of the Fox News reputation for purely biased news reporting aside, it is Fox News that has engaged in a coordinated, persistent and unfounded campaign to smear, undermine, defund and stamp out NPR, the nation’s only public radio service, calling it a socialist conspiracy, a “jihadist inquisition” and accusing it—despite serious analysis showing it to be the least biased radio service in the nation—of pervasive “liberal bias”.

Journalism experts and media analysts are increasingly looking at the anomalous view that there is a “liberal media bias”, which some extreme ideologues on the right have a hard time penetrating. And the clearest explanation emerging from a number of serious studies is literally the problem that extreme ideological conservatives face: that their world view does not correspond to reality, and so serious, credible, unbiased reporting often illustrates a landscape of reality which they cannot tolerate and within which they are not well equipped to debate workable policy solutions.

The Fox News game is a tabloid game—distort, smear, fabricate and exaggerate, remorselessly, and profit from the visceral, primal reaction of an audience which prefers such titillating distortions to information requiring growth, thought, and/or awareness that things can and should be made better in our society. It is the principle of entertaining the public, instead of empowering them. It is Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.

Another way to put this is that serious news reporting is about what is actually going on in the world, and though much of the facts to be reported are sad, even tragic, and may indicate extremely disheartening and negative trend-lines, they are reported with solemn respect for the tragedy of human failing. The Fox News tabloid style of reporting deliberately seeks out points of conflict that can be distorted into horrors and threats, and reports on them with glee, passion and hubris, as if to invite the destruction of others in society.

Jon Stewart is not so severe as to allege that Fox News rides an undercurrent of sadistic tendencies, but the absurdity and the tragedy of what the network devotes its airtime to speaks for itself: NPR is, if anything, so unbiased that all you can get there are facts, information and a view of the landscape—some would like to hear more passionate critique and analysis. It is absolutely, and in no way that anyone who is not a diagnosed psychotic could assert, a “jihadist inquisition”.

It is the very soul of what American media should be, if we are all to be citizens of a free republic.

The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal has already come ashore in the United States. The FBI is investigating allegations that News Corp. personnel tried to or did bribe police and/or spy on the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. Whether there was any such illegal activity at Fox News is not known, and no such evidence has yet come to light. But it would be wiser to distance itself and all of its operations from Mr. Murdoch and those now in police custody than to defend the indefensible or make light of the perverse crime of spying on 9/11 victims.

Cafe Sentido has gone through various incarnations—first ContourNews, then Sentido.tv, including two supplements: CafeSentido.com, an art and exhibits forum, and The Global Intercept, a headline-linking and rapid-review forum—before taking on its current format as the broadsheet online magazine CafeSentido.com, which combines all of the prior incarnations in one forum. On Tuesday, July 19, we reached our 400,000th reader.

Cafe Sentido is still a small, independent publication, with a vision to grow, over time, and establish a new kind of online news source, integrating culture, commentary, science, economics, political analysis and straight news reporting. We look forward to continued growth and thank our readers for their participation, their interest and their attention, respect for which we hold as a sacred commitment. We believe a free and vigorous press is the frame on which a democracy is built.

In a shocking development, a former News of the World reporter and key whistleblower in the phone-hacking scandal now sweeping the News Corp. media empire and British political landscape has been found dead at his home in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. Sean Hoare was the first named journalist to have alleged that Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor and top media officer for Prime Minister David Cameron, knew of and openly encouraged illegal phone hacking and other corrupt practices.

The death is not, at present, being treated as suspicious. But, the investigation is ongoing, and police have yet to publicly confirm the identity of the deceased. A cause of death is not yet known. The news comes as Mr. Hoare’s testimony lends weight to several ongoing inquiries into alleged illegal spying and corruption, and just one day before Rupert Murdoch, his son and the former head of his UK newspaper operations, are scheduled to testify before Parliament.

According to the Guardian:

[Hoare] told the [New York Times] that not only did Coulson know of the phone hacking, but that he actively encouraged his staff to intercept the phone calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives.

In a subsequent interview with the BBC he alleged that he was personally asked by his then-editor, Coulson, to tap into phones. In an interview with the PM programme he said Coulson’s insistence that he didn’t know about the practice was “a lie, it is simply a lie”.

Mr. Coulson was arrested on July 8, for questioning in connection with the alleged campaign of illegal hacking, bribery and attempted influence or intimidation of public officials. Specifically, Coulson was suspected of lying during previous inquiries into the alleged illegal activity at News International’s tabloid publications, under his management.

Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and his recently arrested protégée, Rebekah Brooks, are scheduled to testify before Parliament, tomorrow. With more than ten people now arrested on allegations of corruption and illegal hacking into private files, the scandal that closed the 168-year-old News of the World tabloid is now threatening to metastasize to the rest of the News Corp. news media properties, and to high-ranking public officials. For the second time in as many days, a top-ranking police official has stepped down, due to alleged connections to the News Corp. scandal.

John Yates, the London police commissioner, who was in charge of a 2006 investigation into the same alleged illegal activity, has resigned, as criticism mounts over his alleged intervention to end the investigation on the grounds that there was no evidence of further illegal activity. The arrest of Rebekah Brooks, who resigned last week, raised speculation there could be evidence of higher-level corruption, not yet revealed in the reporting on phone hacking allegations.

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

“The scandal is letting out a lot of anger that has been built up for years in the British public,” says Jasmine Birtles, who runs the Moneymagpie website in London. “Brooks has been arrested on the same day as the British public is hearing she told [Prime Minister] Cameron he had to hire Andy Coulson as chief press officer.”

Whether there was undue influence applied to Mr. Cameron to place Mr. Coulson at Number 10 Downing Street, or whether promises were made regarding access to information that might not otherwise change hands between the Prime Minister’s office and the tabloids, unless it were first made public, is an increasingly widely asked question both Mr. Cameron and Ms. Brooks will be expected to answer.

Cameron has been careful to side with the rest of the Parliament in expressing extreme revulsion at the crimes alleged to have been committed by the News of the World and other Murdoch tabloids. The files of just one private investigator used by the Murdoch tabloids to illegally hack into private phone accounts suggests nearly 4,000 people were targeted. There is at least one other investigator whose files police have not yet begun to parse, and so the possibility that many more people were targeted over what is thought to be at least a decade of illegal spying.

Mr. Yates was under increasing pressure, due to what is now thought to be the incredible claim that police did not have evidence of widespread illegal spying at News of the World and/or other Murdoch tabloids. As long ago as 2003, if not longer, police were aware of efforts by Murdoch employees to spy on the family of Gordon Brown, the eventual and now former prime minister. That information came to light as part of a wider investigation in which the names of some of the victims cited in the current investigation may have already been known to police.

Mr. Yates is not, so far, officially alleged to have engaged in wrongdoing. He says his resignation was necessary, because he had become the target of “inaccurate, uninformed and … malicious gossip”, and that he needed to step down to put a stop to the distraction from preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games. He was, however, to be suspended, and is now thought to have been “too close to” the journalists and editors he was to be investigating.

CNN International is reporting that for Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, their testimony before Parliament tomorrow may turn out to be the single most crucial moment of their entire careers in media. Lord John Prescott has said Murdoch “is responsible” and must be called to account for the alleged crimes committed by more than one of his publications. Others have alleged that the illegal spying may have been used to exert political pressure on key figures.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) recently published an op-ed, in which he argued that “If Washington actually had the discipline to live within its means over the long term, every American citizen would not owe $46,000 toward the national debt.” The rhetoric is effective, but the logic is flawed; not every American “owes” an equal share of the national debt.

The national debt is what the federal government owes in long-term interest on government-backed bonds, Treasury bonds. Long-term Treasury bonds pay out over several decades, and have (thanks to the high credit rating of the United States government) a very low rate of interest. The bonds are used to finance spending in the short term for which there are no sufficient tax revenues in reserve.

Over the life of a given Treasury bond, the interest accruing behaves, in a sense, as government debt. It requires that future budgets cover the cost of putting sufficient funds into a pool of revenues that will eventually be paid out as interest on those bonds. The rate of interest is often not as high as the rate of inflation, making it easy to “finance” the bonds without actually spending extra cash.

At the present time, the rate of interest is actually negative on some Treasury bonds. That means investors are paying more than they expect to get back, in order to have the security of investing in US Treasury bonds, the most secure investment product in the world. The national debt is what it will cost, over time, as all interest is paid out, to finance all bond payments.

The total is not necessarily more than all the revenue that can be expected to be taken in, over the life of the securities in question, and is not necessarily unsustainable, even when it reaches such high levels as 50%, or 80% or 100% of GDP. The comparison is something of a red herring, because GDP is annual (and more than 20% of it is government spending anyway), and long-term Treasury bonds pay out over several decades. More than the percentage of current-year GDP, it is the combination of inflation, GDP growth and tax policy that will determine the viability of such debt.

There are short-term T-bills as well, which “mature” in as few as three to six months, but the full scope of the “national debt” is more about long-term borrowing than short. Deficits are not healthy, unless the level of borrowing stays within the range that credit analysts and credit issuers (bond investors) view as likely to yield a reliable return.

But the key to understanding who actually “owes” money to pay down the national debt is understanding two key components of how it is financed: first, who owes what share of the tax burden, and second, who is actually benefitting from the debt itself, or rather, who is being financed by the government’s borrowing.

In the United States, at present, there is a tragic wealth divide that has, for decades, been eroding the middle class. The wealthy hold most of the wealth and take in most of the income. The top 20% own as much as 90% of all the investment income in the country (this includes Treasury bonds), as well as 84% or more of all the wealth.

It is the wealthy who invest in stocks which benefit directly from government spending (the bottom 50% of the “income ladder” hold virtually no investments of any kind). This could be the record Defense and war spending, or record subsidies to the most profitable corporations in history, the big oil companies. Or, it could be investments that benefit from the massive direct and indirect subsidies that flow to nuclear energy generation, coal production and natural gas drilling. It could be Medicare and Medicaid spending that helps to make the private health insurance model profitable, by covering the most costly segments of the population.

The wealthy enjoy many collateral benefits of government borrowing, not least of which is the direct financing of their own investments, whether through government spending, subsidies or bond payments. Many high-end private-sector investments simply would not be viable as a secure investment, without the government’s activities doing something to support that sector or that type of financial activity.

The fact is, the national debt is made up of a cycle of borrowing and of investment income, which benefits the wealthy far more than it benefits the poor. They benefit from every one of the public services the poor struggle to benefit from, and they do so not only on the personal level, but also as an indirect subsidy to the entire scope of their private investment portfolio, which depends on the stability of the American economy and of its government’s ability to borrow and to finance borrowing.

A scientific calculation of the overall cost-to-benefit ratio of national debt financing for the wealthy or for the poor, specifically, may be too complex to flesh out without a dedicated study. But when you consider that the working poor, and much of the middle class, enjoy relatively little investment income related to government borrowing, yet must pay a significant portion of their taxes each year to finance it, the national debt is actually a system of transfer of wealth from the middle class and working poor to the wealthy.

What motivates such hostile and vitriolic rhetoric on the tax-cuts-for-the-rich side of the political spectrum, in the United States, when discussing the national debt, is the very clear fact that it is their preferred constituency that in fact owes the majority share of the national debt. The populist rhetoric of the Tea Party is often driven by the misconception that everyone in the country will be working off tens of thousands of dollars in irresponsible government borrowing, which is simply not the case.

It is a fundamentally unfair and misleading calculation to say that the national debt should be divided equally among every man, woman and child in the United States, because the equation does not balance out. Indirect beneficiaries of government borrowing cannot owe more, relative to income, than direct beneficiaries. And those who pay more in pre-tax cash to finance government borrowing than they receive in after-tax cash returns on investment, cannot owe more than those who receive more in return than they pay in.

This is not a question of class warfare or of a socialist-minded redistribution of wealth. It is just simple arithmetic: if you are reaping complex financial rewards from the system of government borrowing, you cannot ask those who are paying out of pocket to help you, but getting nothing concrete in returns, to share your burden equally.

In other words, you cannot ask a military enlisted family of four, with one low-ranking military salary and one part-time private-sector salary, and two children, to pay $46,000 to help billionaires and hedge funds manage their profits. That every single American owes $46,000 to finance the national debt is a distortion: each owes his or her own share, and those shares depend on how the pie was divided up to begin with.

Weekly Address: “Instead of Subsidizing Yesterday’s Energy Sources, We Need to Invest in Tomorrow’s”

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Obama laid out his plans to address rising gas prices over the short and the long term. While there is no silver bullet to bring down prices right away, there are a few things we can do. This week, the Attorney General launched a task force dedicated to rooting out fraud or manipulations in the oil markets. The President called for finally ending the $4 billion in taxpayer money that the oil and gas companies receive annually. And, we need to continue safe, responsible production of oil at home. But in the long term, we need to invest in clean, renewable energy. That is why the President strongly disagrees with a proposal in Congress that cuts our investments in clean energy by 70 percent.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address on Gas Prices
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Washington, DC

This is a time of year when people get together with family and friends to observe Passover and to celebrate Easter. It’s a chance to give thanks for our blessings and reaffirm our faith, while spending time with the people we love. We all know how important that is – especially in hard times. And that’s what a lot of people are facing these days.

Even though the economy is growing again and we’ve seen businesses adding jobs over the past year, many are still looking for work. And even if you haven’t faced a job loss, it’s still not easy out there. Your paycheck isn’t getting bigger, while the cost of everything from college for your kids to gas for your car keeps rising. That’s something on a lot of people’s minds right now, with gas prices at $4 a gallon. It’s just another burden when things were already pretty tough.

Now, whenever gas prices shoot up, like clockwork, you see politicians racing to the cameras, waving three-point plans for two dollar gas. You see people trying to grab headlines or score a few points. The truth is, there’s no silver bullet that can bring down gas prices right away.

But there are a few things we can do. This includes safe and responsible production of oil at home, which we are pursuing. In fact, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003. On Thursday, my Attorney General also launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators. We’re going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain. And another step we need to take is to finally end the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies we give to the oil and gas companies each year. That’s $4 billion of your money going to these companies when they’re making record profits and you’re paying near record prices at the pump. It has to stop.

Instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s. We need to invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that’s the answer. That’s the key to helping families at the pump and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We can see that promise already. Thanks to an historic agreement we secured with all the major auto companies, we’re raising the fuel economy of cars and trucks in America, using hybrid technology and other advances. As a result, if you buy a new car in the next few years, the better gas mileage is going to save you about $3,000 at the pump.

But we need to do more. We need to harness the potential I’ve seen at promising start-ups and innovative clean energy companies across America. And that’s at the heart of a debate we’re having right now in Washington about the budget.

Both Democrats and Republicans believe we need to reduce the deficit. That’s where we agree. The question we’re debating is how we do it. I’ve proposed a balanced approach that cuts spending while still investing in things like education and clean energy that are so critical to creating jobs and opportunities for the middle class. It’s a simple idea: we need to live within our means while at the same time investing in our future.

That’s why I disagree so strongly with a proposal in Congress that cuts our investments in clean energy by 70 percent. Yes, we have to get rid of wasteful spending – and make no mistake, we’re going through every line of the budget scouring for savings. But we can do that without sacrificing our future. We can do that while still investing in the technologies that will create jobs and allow the United States to lead the world in new industries. That’s how we’ll not only reduce the deficit, but also lower our dependence on foreign oil, grow the economy, and leave for our children a safer planet. And that’s what our mission has to be.

Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.

In a desperate move to force his controversial budget measure through the state legislature, Gov. Scott Walker, Republican of Wisconsin, is now threatening to fire 12,000 state employees. Critics say there is no budget shortfall significant enough to warrant this action, and that Walker is again using threats and aggression to force his legislation through. The bill he is backing would strip public employees of all collective bargaining rights.

Walker’s proposal is so extreme that this week, FOX News’ Shepard Smith broadcast a critique of the legislation suggesting it was “melarky” to say there was a budget crisis, and that Walker was simply trying to break the unions in order to hurt Democratic candidates’ chances of winning elections.

Today, tens of thousands of protesters have again massed at the state capitol in Madison. Reports from Madison suggest that today’s protests are going to be the largest to date. Last Saturday, an estimated 68,000 people gathered at the state capitol. Today there are protests around the United States, to support the public servants fighting to keep their rights in Wisconsin.

Fourteen Democratic state senators remain in Illinois, boycotting all legislative activity until Gov. Walker withdraws the ban on collective bargaining. Walker is now being said to have “backed himself into a corner”, unable to back down and unable to get his plan passed. In other states with real budget crises, they have been able to reach consensus; if Walker continues to push his plan, when there is no budgetary logic to his final demand, it could make him a lame-duck governor, just eight weeks into his term in office.

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he raised taxes in the state by $1 billion to fix a budget deficit. While Walker complains about deficits and a “budget emergency”, his plan includes zero job-creation, zero budget repair other than slashing spending, and wasteful tax cuts designed to deliver taxpayer money to the wealthy.

There have been mounting calls for a criminal probe of Gov. Walker’s activities since taking office, since he admitted to someone posing as one of the Koch brothers that he could instigate violence in order to crack down on protesters and suggested his plan is to break the unions to make it easier for Republicans to win elections.

So far, Gov. Walker has threatened, publicly:

• To order the national guard to disperse demonstrators;
• To round up state legislators boycotting the budget plan, by coercive means;
• To surveil and interrogate families of boycotting lawmakers;
• To box Democrats out of other legislative business;
• To fire 12,000 public servants…

He appears to have suggested to a prank phone caller that he was engaged in a coordinated strategy with the Koch Brothers, the Club for Growth and other Republican partisans and corporate interests, using phrases like “one of us”, to attack workers rights in his state in order to undermine Democratic candidates’ chances for election.

Gov. Walker suggested he is trying to lure Democrats back to Madison, that he will never negotiate with them, but that by luring them back “to yell at me”, he thinks Republicans can open a new session, with a quorum, then vote without any of the Democratic members present.

The protest rally opposing Gov. Walker’s draconian plan to eliminate collective bargaining rights is now entering its second week. 14 Democratic lawmakers remain outside the state, in boycott of the plan to impose Walker’s radical agenda on the people of Wisconsin. And today the news comes the last union that had not abandoned Walker, the state police union, has now done so.

Tracy Fuller, Executive Board president of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association, representing state troopers and local police, has issued a statement criticizing Walker’s plan:

I don’t believe that the Troopers Association could have possibly predicted, or comprehended the events that are unfolding in front of us at this time. I can agree that it was a tragic mistake for the Trooper’s Association to endorse the Governor, I can’t do anything about it, and they are reaping the benefits of their actions. I do believe they thought any benefits gained would be for all of the members of WLEA, after all, the PCO’s, Field Agents, Capitol Police, and U.W. Police are all in the same union.

Who could have possibly thought that the Governor could pluck one local’s members from a union and identify it as being worthy of bargaining for a contract? Some of the comments and attitudes that have been made and displayed would have you believe that the Governor consulted with the board of the Trooper’s Association about what his plans were in all of this.

After wealthy Tea Party sponsors funded a weekend visit by out-of-state protesters-for-hire, the crowds have continued to swell. It is estimated that more than 70,000 rallied at the state capitol on Sunday, and more are expected to join today, President’s Day. With more than half the state’s population, possibly over 60%, opposing Walker’s plan, protest organizers are calling for anyone who opposes this kind of dictatorial action in furtherance of a radical one-party agenda, to converge on the state capitol to make their voices heard.

There is a movement ongoing to recall Republican state senators supporting the bill. Walker cannot be recalled until he has been in office for one year, but there are efforts underway to organize the petition signatures necessary to move forward on a recall vote next January. Only 3 Republican votes are needed in the state Senate to give the Democrats an opportunity to block the bill.

Gov. Walker is calling on the Democrats to come back to Wisconsin to “discuss” and “debate” the rights of union members to collectively bargain, but has also vowed that these debates will not lead to any compromise, no matter how small. The governor’s intransigence could mean the Democratic boycott of the state Senate will continue until the bill is withdrawn from consideration altogether.

The last week has seen mounting protests in Madison, Wisconsin, with crowds occupying the state capitol grounds swelling from 10,000 to 25,000 to 30,000, 40,000 and now on Saturday, 60,000. Schools have been closed, and university faculty and students are striking in order to participate in the protests. The demonstrators oppose Gov. Walker’s plan to strip public employees of all collective bargaining rights.

While the Republican governor, and the two brothers who now lead the Republican majorities in the Assembly and state Senate, seek to give the state what some have described as dictatorial power in negotiation of public sector contracts, wealthy partisans from out of state have hired “astroturf” protesters said to be affiliated with the Tea Party to act as mercenary pro-government protesters and to verbally abuse the protesters at the state capitol.

The paid volunteers coming from out of state, with trips and travel reportedly organized by wealthy donors, are being criticized as the latest in a series of actions taken by Gov. Walker or his supporters to attempt to intimidate Wisconsinites into accepting draconian and sweeping changes to state law.

Last week, Walker drew ire across the nation for suggesting he would use the National Guard to disperse the protesters, an apparent threat to use force against unarmed civilians exercising their basic constitutional right to peaceably assemble. He was threatened with defections from the National Guard, lawsuits and possible criminal filings, should he attempt to call in the National Guard. The following day, Wisconsin guardsmen were seen joining the protesters.

Walker also allegedly ordered the state police chief, father of the two brothers running the legislature, to send troopers to send patrol teams to the homes of the 14 Democratic legislators who have left the state in defiance of the governor’s plan. Again, Walker and his supporters were accused of harassment and intimidation, trying to use force or the threat of force, to intimidate critics and impose his will unilaterally, even as tens of thousands demanded a change to his plan.

On Saturday, the appearance of so-called “Tea Party” activists, shipped in from out of state by wealthy backers of Gov. Walker, has been seen as a cynical attempt to pay working people to participate in a campaign of intimidation against the working people of Wisconsin. Analysts on Sunday talk shows are now describing Madison, Wisconsin as “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights in America”.

Advocates on both sides of the issue are now saying, “as Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation”, or so it might be, as Republican governors across the country join Walker in his coordinated assault on labor rights. Democrats, civil rights groups and labor activists, are declaring the plans “an attack on the middle class”, and progressive groups are now organizing a campaign to recall every Republican in the state Senate who has been there for more than one year.

Protesters in Madison say they are just ordinary middle class Americans, committed to public service or to supporting their public servants, and that they will not leave the state capitol grounds until the plan to strip public employees of their rights is withdrawn. The Republican hard core of Walker, Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald, say they will not negotiate on any element of the legislation; it will be imposed as is.

The sequence of threats made by Gov. Walker and the apparent attempts to use his office to bully critics have led to suggestions that he should be investigated for abuse of office.

The refusal to negotiate on any terms of the legislation, despite the unions’ apparently confirmed and coordinated agreement to all the fiscal cuts, despite their severity, has led some to speculate Walker is using false claims of a catastrophic budget situation to empower himself to eliminate unions in the state and undermine political opposition to big-money Republican machine politics.

There are suggestions Gov. Walker should be investigated for what might be an elaborate attempt to rig elections in the state, or even for colluding with other Republican governors to do the same in several states, even as they attempt to engineer a pro-Republican redistricting of the national Congressional map.

In more than 100 years of Nobel Peace Prizes, only a dozen women have ever won. Civil-rights and peace activist Jody Williams, received the award in 1997 as the chief strategist of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which established the ?rst global treaty banning antipersonnel mines.

Williams believes that peace is de?ned by human (not national) security and that it must be achieved through sustainable development, environmental justice, and meeting people’s basic needs. To this end, she co-founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative, endorsed by six of seven living female Peace laureates. She chairs the effort to support activists, researchers, and others working toward peace, justice, and equality for women and thus humanity. Williams also continues to ?ght for the total global eradication of landmines.

The people of Egypt today mark 14 days of nonviolent uprising against a brutal military regime that has ruled with near total power for 30 years. The peaceful protests are an astonishing coalition of educated and working-class, Muslim and Christian, secularist and religiously driven, old and young, male and female, and yet they are in fact a peaceful citizen-driven revolution against tyranny. The Mubarak regime has waged a brutal assault on peaceful demonstrators, human rights monitors and international press, and now there is concern the international attention may turn away.

Human Rights Watch is reporting that at least 297 people have been killed by the Egyptian regime since 28 January, “232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez”. The huge death toll comes from just three cities, and according to the human rights watchdog, “The vast majority of these deaths occurred on January 28 and 29 as a result of live gunfire.” It also appears many were killed by rubber bullets apparently fired indiscriminately at ultra-close range or when teargas canisters were fired directly at demonstrators.

The behavior of the Mubarak regime since the outbreak of the protests has been consistent and unwavering: it appears to be the behavior of a military dictatorship with feudal control over the society it rules, which sees no reason to abandon its long-running use of violence, terror and propaganda to impose its will. When news reports began to emerge showing evidence the regime was behind the killings, and that hundreds of thousands had spontaneously joined the protests, a concerted, intense and violent campaign against international journalists began, and paramilitaries began throwing firebombs into crowds of unarmed civilians.

There is concern now that the regime fully intends to push the media out —detentions have continued unabated, despite promises to release high-profile prisoners and implement reforms—, crush non-governmental human rights groups operating in Egypt, and then wage war against the protest movement. CNN’s Anderson Cooper says he feels guilty having left Egypt temporarily for his own safety and to seek medical attention, suggesting protesters may be at risk if international media turn away from Cairo or if the protesters are forced out of Tahrir Square, where media have relatively consistent access to images of events.

The revolution in Egypt is a peaceful protest movement, calling for meaningful democratic reform, and defiantly refusing to accept any promise coming from a discredited president known to rule through corruption, violence and authoritarian abuses. In Egypt, in 2011, the revolution must be televised. International media attention is the closest thing to real security the demonstrators calling for justice can hope to have, and media can help to spread the word about what is really going on under the rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Every day, more information surfaces showing evidence of brutal authoritarian crimes. On Wednesday and Thursday, it is now known, the regime threw firebombs and fired live bullets into Liberation Square, into crowds of unarmed demonstrators which included women and children.

When Mohamed El Baradei —widely seen as a credible Mubarak opponent and spokesperson for the protest movement, a Nobel laureate who used to head the International Atomic Energy Agency— met with 9 leading pro-democracy activists, every one of them was detained by Mubarak’s security forces. The regime is systematically rejecting negotiations with leading pro-democracy activists, while meeting with establishment figures who lead various opposition factions.

Protest leaders, El Baradei, the United States government and human rights watchdogs in Egypt and abroad, all agree the “transition talks” Vice President Omar Suleiman is staging are inadequate and not substantive enough in terms of implementing democratic change in Egypt. Suleiman has said the regime will not lift the state of emergency.

In a shocking moment of contempt, the new prime minister named by Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Shafiq, repeatedly ignored questions by CNN’s Candy Crowley regarding a campaign of arrests against demonstrators and journalists, Shafiq flippantly remarked ”Frankly speaking, if there is some problems, it’s not intended at all, my dear.”

Shafiq’s rhetoric suggests the government either claims to have no ability whatsoever to control the armed paramilitaries and security forces working for the government, or no control over its own authoritarian reflexes. He seemed almost to be laughing as he said “some problems”. Anderson Cooper reported estimates run as high as 1.5 million security agents employed by the regime’s secret police forces.

There is a fundamental logical disconnect between the rhetoric of the regime and its behavior, between the regime’s claim of total incapacity to prevent violent assaults on unarmed civilians and its claim that it alone has the unique ability to prevent “chaos”. And each of these logically incoherent rhetorical flourishes has been used to cover up for brutal anti-democratic measures, which in at least 297 cases have resulted in death for innocent Egyptians.

The world media has a moral obligation not to leave Tahrir Square, not to shift the focus away from the ongoing nonviolent uprising against Hosni Mubarak and his regime. Human rights organizations describe long-running and systematic detention without process and torture, sometimes for nothing more than association with a suspect.

According to Human Rights Watch:

Torture, although it is strictly forbidden under Egyptian law and the international human rights treaties Egypt has signed, has been a widespread and persistent phenomenon in the country, particularly during interrogation of security suspects. Methods of torture include beatings with fists, feet, leather straps, sticks, and electric cables; suspension in contorted and painful positions accompanied by beatings; the application of electric shocks; and sexual intimidation and violence. The government-appointed National Council for Human Rights, in its first annual report released in April 2005, acknowledged that torture is part of “normal investigative practice” in Egypt.

If the protests in Tahrir Square are dispersed, without a significant change in the makeup of the governing political structure, those who have defiantly confronted the regime will most likely be detained and may be subjected to ill treatment in the “normal” atmosphere of extreme violence and total impunity, in which the security forces of Hosni Mubarak have operated.

The government is systematically and decisively ignoring even its own prohibition against torture, and has blocked every attempt to investigate incidents of torture. “To date, Egypt has refused to permit the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit the country,” according to the Human Rights Watch report Black Hole, on the use of torture in Egypt.

There is a fundamental ethical and human obligation to bear witness, to keep attention focused on the fate of those brave souls who are staring down the brutality and impunity of a military dictatorship that disguises itself in the trappings of civilian government and business development. International media, especially television cameras, have an obligation to ensure that they do not walk away from those innocent people who have determined that now is the time for their people to say no to tyranny and degradation.

Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the hardline regime that has ruled Syria for nearly four decades, and whose government imposed strict Internet controls after the beginning of the uprising in Egypt, has announced he will move to implement political reforms in his country. It is not clear how those reforms would affect his government’s control on power, or whether his office would be up for a national election, but the announcement is the latest sign of how pervasive an effect the Egyptian protest movement is having across the region.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

In a rare interview, Mr. Assad told The Wall Street Journal that the protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen are ushering in a “new era” in the Middle East, and that Arab rulers would need to do more to accommodate their people’s rising political and economic aspirations.

“If you didn’t see the need of reform before what happened in Egypt and Tunisia, it’s too late to do any reform,” Mr. Assad said in Damascus, as Egyptian protesters swarmed the streets of Cairo pressing for the resignation of longtime President Hosni Mubarak.

Assad is widely seen as a front-line nemesis for the US and its closest ally in the region, Israel, mostly because of his support for Palestinian resistance and for actions labeled as “terrorist” by most western powers. But some experts have long hoped for a more moderate and modernizing hand from Assad, who was not the engineer of the hardline policies of his government, but their heir.

The huge number of Iraqi refugees flooding into Syria since the 2003 invasion has put a strain on the government and the economy, and has opened up the possibility of more substantive dialogue on regional cooperation between Syria and the United States. That dialogue has not been developed very far, but the Obama administration is reported to have been working to persuade Assad to “unclench [his] fist”, to use a phrase from Pres. Obama’s inaugural address of January 2009.

With policy-makers in the White House reportedly working around the clock to help recalibrate US foreign policy to this “new era” that Assad, echoing Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed El Baradei, noted, there could be real opportunity to reform the intricate but strained Israeli-Palestinian peace process and to remake the dynamics of relationships across the region.

Assad was careful to say that “Syria is stable” and to attribute this stability to his government’s interest in aligning itself with the interests of the people: “Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence…you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.” It is not clear whether Syria is about to be the next scene of major demonstrations, but with major pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, and demonstrations criticizing Islamist extremism or government abuses in Lebanon and Sudan, Assad’s pro-active maneuver makes sense.

It remains to be seen if any serious political reforms are implemented in Syria, or if Assad’s pledge is meant to put him rhetorically on the side of the people. While it controls political speech and allows little serious opposition, Syria’s government is not necessarily as unpopular as the Mubarak regime, and Assad might be trying to reinvent himself, as history sweeps the region.

More from Cafe Sentido:

• Students Stage Pro-democracy Demonstrations in Sudan
• Egypt Updates: ‘Basic Collapse of Law & Order’, Anger at Mubarak
• Egypt Update: Military Appears to Protect Demonstrators (video)
• Egypt Updates: Worldwide Protests Join Demonstrators’ Call for Mubarak to Go
• Egypt Updates: Uprising Intensifies, Mubarak to Dismiss Government
• Pro-democracy Protests Spread to Jordan
• Pro-democracy Protests Spread Across Arabic-speaking World
• Tens of Thousands Protest Authoritarian Rule in Egypt
• Tunisian Regime Toppled by Street Protests
• Internet Access Must Be a Human Right
• ‘A New Beginning’: Obama’s Cairo Speech (video + transcript)

Of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, three opted not to attend the State of the Union address, each of them among the most conserative to sit on the Court in decades. Justice Alito will be in Hawaii for a speaking engagement—a feeble excuse given the fact the SOTU is a Constitutionally mandated ritual—, while Justices Scalia and Thomas, both recently stained by overtly partisan dealings, are also expected not to attend.

In a year when Republicans and Democrats have agreed to sit together in a show of civility, in the wake of the shooting of a Congresswoman literally targeted with gunsights in a partisan ad, three justices sworn by law to a life of nonpartisan neutrality have decided to themselves be the proponents of extremist partisan activism.

The question of whether any Supreme Court justice should attend is another matter. Some view the judicial oath as warranting a general restraint on the part of all justices on occasions of legislative and policy narrative, like the State of the Union. But when six of nine agree it is a fitting Constitutional event for their participation, showing deference and respect for the other two branches of government, the two governed by the electoral process and the choice of the people, the refusal of three justices known for their ideological, and in at least two cases, partisan activism, is all the more concerning.

The 6-3 split on the Court is being described by some as a sign of a possibly more extreme radicalization of the conservative wing, which has tended to consist of either 4 or 5 justices, depending on the details of the matter before them.

There is no political fallout for acts of discourtesy on the part of Supreme Court justices, who serve for life, but there has been increasing analysis regarding the partisan nature of some of the off-campus activities of the justices who chose not to attend.

Recent revelations about Justice Thomas’ failure to report over $700,000 in personal income his wife received from conservative organizations with briefs or cases pending before the Court have raised new calls for a federal investigation into possible corruption, and possible —though unlikely— impeachment.

Glenn Beck has once more taken extremist hate-speech to a new extreme, calling for the murder of liberals and progressives, whom he alleges are revolutionaries who are plotting an armed struggle to overthrow the United States government. It is the most unfounded and absurd of his conspiracy theories to date, and is clearly aimed at inciting a violent emotional reaction from people who are susceptible to the language of combat and armed intervention in the political realm.

MediaMatters has published a transcript of the program, which includes the following:

You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they’re revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.

Here is my advice when you’re dealing with people who believe in something that strongly — you take them seriously. You listen to their words and you believe that they will follow up with what they say.

Glenn Beck’s extremist rhetoric has always been too extreme for television, too extreme for paid cable, too extreme for any society in which decent people seek to live free of the tyranny and oppression of small minds and evil ideas. But with his deliberate call for the violent assassination of liberals, be they politicians or civilians, he has crossed a line into the language of incitement to violence.

Given what we now know about how Glenn Beck’s violent and obsessive rants affect the minds of a small number of his viewers, we know that Mr. Beck has been made aware that his words are leading to actual plots and actual violent acts. More than once, his incitements have led to violent plots. FOX News has seen the same evidence.

It is time for the free and independent media in our free society to exercise their discretion and remove Glenn Beck from our media discourse. He should be investigated both for whether there has been a deliberate intent to instigate violent acts, and for ties to the Republican candidates whose cause he has sought to serve by calling for violence or intimidation of opponents and their supporters.

In October, MediaMatters published the following list of specific cases where Beck used radical distortions together with violent imagery, apparently to foment visceral hatred of liberal politicians and liberal voters:

Beck pours gasoline on “average American,” asks, “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?” On his television show, Beck claimed to be imitating Obama while pouring liquid from a gasoline can — which he later stated was water — on an actor portraying the “average American.” Beck said during his demonstration: “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire? … We didn’t vote to lose the republic.” [Fox News' Glenn Beck, 4/9/09]

Quoting Jefferson, Beck warns about “rivers of blood.” On his Fox News show, Beck quoted a letter by Thomas Jefferson warning that ” ‘if they lose freedom’ — he’s speaking of us, future generations — ‘if they lose freedom, there will be rivers of blood.’ ” Beck continued in his own words, “Boy, I hope that’s not true, but I can tell you there will be rivers of blood if we don’t have values and principles.” [Glenn Beck, 5/14/10]

Ranting that gov’t under Nixon “wasn’t as corrupt as it is now,” Beck suggests Obama admin might kill “10 percent” of population. On his June 10 show, Beck warned that “anarchists, Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, Maoists” have to “eliminate 10 percent of the U.S. population” in order to “gain control.” They couldn’t achieve such a goal when Richard Nixon was president, Beck stated, because “the family was together” and the government under Nixon “wasn’t as corrupt as it is now.” Beck added: “Now they can. Now they can.”

Beck later played a clip of an FBI agent who infiltrated the Weather Underground and warned about extremists who want to kill people. Beck responded to the clip by stating: “These are the same people that are everywhere in our government and our education system. Please, please. Learn from history. Please.”

Beck portrays Obama, Democrats as vampires, suggests “driv[ing] a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.” On his March 30, 2009, Fox News show, Beck aired a graphic portraying Obama and Democrats as vampires and said: “The government is full of vampires, and they are trying to suck the lifeblood out of the economy.” Beck then suggested “driv[ing] a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.” Beck returned to that imagery on his January 19 radio show, warning listeners that progressives are “vampires” who now have a “taste of blood” and are “gonna start getting more and more violent.”

Beck talks about “put[ting] poison” in Pelosi’s wine. In 2009, Beck’s Fox News show featured a segment in which Beck said the following to a woman wearing a mask of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

BECK: So, Speaker Pelosi, I just wanted to — you gonna drink your wine? Are you blind? Do those eyes not work? There you — I want you to drink it now. Drink it. Drink it. Drink it.

I really just wanted to thank you for having me over here to wine country. You know, to be invited, I thought I had to be a major Democratic donor or a longtime friend of yours, which I’m not.

By the way, I put poison in your — no, I — I look forward to all the policy discussions that we’re supposed to have — you know, on health care, energy reform, and the economy. [Glenn Beck, 8/6/09]

Beck: “Grab a torch.” Asserting that politicians are addicted to spending, Beck stated: “When do we ever run those who are bankrupting our country and literally stealing our children’s future out of town? Grab a torch.” [Glenn Beck, 1/6/10]

Beck suggests that progressives support “armed insurrection.” After President Obama signed health care reform legislation into law, Beck suggested that progressives support “armed insurrection” and asked, “Why would the president take up immigration right away, after he’s just punched you in the face with health care?” [Glenn Beck, 3/23/10]

Beck suggests Pelosi and Obama support “pick[ing] up a gun” to advance “revolution.” During the same edition of his Fox News show, Beck said that “violence is the wrong way to go,” but asked his viewers: “You’d pick up a gun? Have you ever thought of that?” He then pointed to several pictures, including images of Obama and Pelosi, and stated: “These people have. Because possibly, maybe the question should be asked, maybe they’re tired of evolution, and maybe they are waiting for revolution.” Beck also said: “Haven’t we just been spanked? Hasn’t most of the country — doesn’t most of the country feel like they’ve been spanked over health care? You bet. I do, you do. A lot of people do.” [Glenn Beck, 3/23/10]

Beck suggests Obama administration may kill him. Also on that same edition of his Fox News program, Beck said: “For those of you in the administration, who are coming after me … remember, you’ve broken three [of the 10 Commandments], let’s not make it four; thou shalt not kill.” [Glenn Beck, 3/23/10]

Beck: “The revolution of 1776 was a picnic compared to what the revolutionaries of today would like to do. … Usually, millions of people die.” On June 9, while discussing “radicals” in the country, Beck told his audience: “Here’s what you’ll learn. The revolution of 1776 was a picnic compared to what the revolutionaries of today would like to do. It’s not a lot of fun. Usually, millions of people die.”

After Williams’ arrest, Beck has continued to frequently use violent rhetoric on Fox News

Beck suggests progressive coalition will become violent and riot “a year from now.” On his Fox News program, while discussing how progressives are supposedly trying to “nudge” the United States towards “global governance,” Beck said that “violence is a part of the overall strategy.” While discussing a coalition of unions and progressive groups that are planning a march in Washington, D.C., Beck said that he believes the march will be “peaceful,” but suggested that “a year from now” there may be violence and riots “when the cuts take place.” Beck also proclaimed that the Democrats have been “infected with the tree of revolution” and “radicals” who are a “danger to our republic.” [Glenn Beck, 9/14/10]

Beck connects U.S. progressives to the Holocaust, says they “have not changed their viewpoint.” Beck announced that “if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it.” During the segment, Beck linked several U.S. progressives to eugenics and the Holocaust and proceeded to say that progressives “have not changed their viewpoint; they’ve only changed their language.” [Glenn Beck, 8/3/10]

Beck: After election, “our streets will not be peaceful” due to progressives “agitating.” Discussing the upcoming elections, Beck told his viewers “activists” “are about to go back to agitating, because once they lose control of the House, they have to.” After encouraging people to vote, Beck said that after the election, “our streets will not be peaceful. They will start protesting and agitating again.” [Glenn Beck, 9/30/10]

“Violence will come”: Beck also uses his radio program and other outlets to engage in violent fearmongering

Though Williams indicated he did not listen to Beck’s radio program, Beck frequently employs violent rhetoric during his radio program, often warning of eventual violence from “the left.”

Beck: “To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter.” Telling his listeners that they “are going to learn so much on Friday,” Beck compared himself to “Israeli Nazi hunters” and commented: “I’m telling you, I’m going to find these big progressives and, to the day I die, I’m going to be a progressive hunter.” He added:

BECK: I’m going to find these people that have done this to our — you know, to our country, and expose them. I don’t care where — I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes. I’m going to expose what they have done and make sure that the people understand, because our Constitution, our republic — if it survives — it will only survive because the people are waking up and through the grace of God, because we are that close to losing our republic. [The Glenn Beck Program, 1/20/10]

Beck warns that “in the end, in revolutions, real dangerous killers show up when things start to fall apart.” Discussing how the government is “growing out of control,” Beck attacked former White House green jobs adviser Van Jones and “the government” for using “fear tactics.” Beck told listeners that he “told you this would happen” and added that “I told you just last week that I believe these are the most dangerous two years of our republic. Because in the end, in revolutions, the real dangerous killers show up when things start to fall apart. When the nudge moves to shove, and the shove doesn’t work, the killers show up. It happens every time. That’s why we must be united for peace, we must be united with love, we must be united with God.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/27/10]

Beck: “Violence will come. And violence will come from the left. Violence is part of the plan.” Beck warned listeners that “if you don’t think violence is coming, I’m going to share some audio of Frances Fox Piven that will boggle your mind.” Beck said that “they don’t mind violence. Violence will come. And violence will come from the left. Violence is part of the plan. Not mine, not yours.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/13/10]

Beck on progressives: When the “soft revolution” fails, they “just start shooting people.” Beck claimed that progressives are engaging in a “soft revolution” designed to silence voices like his. He added: “If somebody starts to turn on them, or they can’t get everyone to silence, that’s when the arrests come, or that’s when they start a hard revolution. That’s when they start just shooting people. I hope we don’t get to that point. I pray that we don’t get to that point, but I never thought this country would get to the point where we are today.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 5/27/10]

Beck warns of violence: “Trouble” by the “most violent” progressives “is coming.” Beck suggested that Obama would respond to potential GOP victories in November elections by “going right directly” to the “most progressive, most violent, the worst of the worst on the left and stir ‘em up. ‘Get out into the streets. Cause trouble.’ It’s what’s coming. It’s what’s coming.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/24/10]

Beck: “Violence is coming” and “the left will blame me.” Beck said that people need to “wake up” and see “what is coming,” which Beck described as “violence.” He added that “the left will blame me.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/2/10]

Beck: “God will wash this nation with blood if he has to, but he doesn’t have to.” Referencing Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Beck said that “God will wash this nation with blood if he has to, but he doesn’t have to.” Beck added that “we are passing all of the exits. Gang, there is one exit left. There is one exit left, and it is God. Everything that is coming our way is too big to handle on our own. If we do not put God at the center of our own personal lives and the center of our country, we will not survive. The country will be washed with blood and then someone will have to start over, and God only knows how long that takes.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/25/10]

Beck warns of “revolutionaries” who will “set our streets on fire.” Urging people to vote in the November elections, Beck said that “in the short term” this election is “going to make things worse” because “revolutionaries” are going to “rise up” and “set our streets on fire.” He added that “our future is at stake right now.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/16/10]

Beck: “The army … of the extreme left is gathering” and they are saying “cops are bad, kill the cops.” On his radio show, Beck discussed riots in Oakland, stating: “The army, if you will, of the extreme left is gathering, and they are coming to the conclusion of cops are bad, kill the cops, they’re the oppressors. It’s all the 1960s, you know, pig stuff. It’s the same stuff.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 7/12/10]

Beck: “This game is for keeps”; “[Y]ou can shoot me in the head … but there will be 10 others that line up.” Asking his audience to “pray for protection,” Beck claimed that “the most powerful people on the planet on the left” were “not going to go away easy” because “[t]his game is for keeps. This is who controls the United States of America and its destiny.” He asked his listeners to “please keep me in your prayers, keep my staff in your prayers, for safety, for wisdom,” adding, “Just pray for protection, please.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/8/09]

Later in the same program, Beck said:

BECK: You can try to put the lid on this group of people, but you will never silence us. You will never — you can shoot me in the head, you can shoot the next guy in the head, but there will be 10 others that line up. And it may not happen today, it may not happen next week, but freedom will be restored in this land. Period. And no matter what you want to call it, it is a totalitarian state that you’re headed towards. [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/8/09]

Beck speaks for one-third of the nation: “[Y]ou will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun” and “before I acquiesce and be silent.” Beck has warned “ACORN, GE, Obama, SEIU” that “you are awakening a sleeping giant, and I have nothing to do with it,” and that “America is waking up. You know the American Revolution took place with 12 percent of the population? Twelve. Are you telling me there is not 30 percent of this population that you will have to shoot me in the forehead before I let somebody into my house to tell me how to raise my children; you will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun; you will have to shoot me in the forehead before I acquiesce and be silent.” Beck further stated:

BECK: They cannot move on these things, because they are building a machine that will crush the entrepreneurial sprit and the freedom that our Founding Fathers designed. This machine, whatever it is they are building, will crush it. Do not let them build another piece.

So while I turn away, I want to make sure that I have at least 10 million eyes watching — watching every single move they are making.

[...]

We know why they’re doing what they’re doing. You need to do what you need to do, and as long as that is peaceful, we will save our country. [The Glenn Beck Program, 7/30/09]

Beck suggests Obama is “trying to destroy the country” and is pushing America toward civil war. While discussing the ongoing controversy over Arizona’s immigration law, Beck told his listeners that “we are being pushed” toward civil war and that Obama is “trying to destroy the country.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 5/19/10]

Beck: “There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America.” Beck has claimed that “there is a revolution, and they think they can get away with it quietly,” adding: “At this point, gang, I’m not sure, they may be able to because they are so far ahead of us. They know what they’re dealing against; most of America does not yet. Most of America doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on. There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America, and the way it is done, it has been done through the — the guise of an election, but they lied to us the entire time.” He also said, “And they’re gonna say, ‘we did it democratically,’ and they are going to grab power every way they can. And God help us in an emergency.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/31/09]

Beck: “[T]hat’s not begging for World War III; that’s called giving you the facts.” Referencing a speech he had given the previous weekend in Alaska, Beck discussed how he told the audience that “you are Fort Knox.” He explained that if the economy collapses, Alaskans must “grab your guns” because “the Russians, the Chinese — everyone is coming to Alaska, because that’s where the money is. Now, that’s not begging for World War III; that’s called giving you the facts. But see, there are those people that really want this to collapse, and they are planning on violence. They’re planning on it — we’ve already shown you. We’ve already seen it with SEIU. We’ve shown it to you over in Europe.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/13/10]

Beck says his audience contains “the leaders of tomorrow” who will save you from “camps, maybe literally.” Referencing an event he appeared at the previous weekend with Sarah Palin, Beck said that they have “30 million people in our footprint.” Beck explained that “this 10 percent is going to be the shelter for the other 90 percent.” He added: “This is the group, this 10 percent will be the ones that when all hell goes to handbasket, and everybody on the left and the right are yelling and arguing and trying to pull you into camps, maybe literally, pull you into camps. You’re gonna say ‘Don’t go, don’t go, everything’s fine. Don’t worry, we can take care of each other. We’ve got each other, we’re Americans, we’re better than this.’ ” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/13/10]

Beck: “They’re trying to beat it out of you slowly. Boil you, basically, like a frog.” After agreeing with a caller who suggested we should “collapse the Federal Reserve” and “build it back up,” Beck said that the government already “started planning for the next phase, and the next phase is a global governance sort of situation.” Discussing how people should prepare for a global collapse, Beck added that “people are not going to go peacefully into the night if it is a quick collapse.” Beck said that “the fear here is that they already have the structure to box you in. They don’t come with the jackbooted thugs on the first day. They come and take away your sugary sweets. They come and take away your right to go to the beach and dig in the sand. They come and they watch your credit cards. … They’re trying to beat it out of you slowly. Boil you, basically, like a frog. I think we win. I think we win if things remain stable, but a power grab is a possibility in this crazy upside-down America that we live in.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/21/10]

Beck: “I don’t know how much time each of us has. I don’t know how much time the country has.” Beck “beg[ged]” his listeners to “please give me the benefit of the doubt,” and said: “I’m begging you to get back down on your knees. I’m begging you to be the person that you were and you promised yourself you would be on September 11th and 12th. I’m begging you to get down on your knees. What is coming is not good. I don’t know how things end. I should rephrase that. I do know how things end. But I know how things end after a long struggle. I don’t know how that struggle is gonna work out. I don’t know how much time each of us has. I don’t know how much time the country has.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/25/10]

Beck: Obama administration is “poking” at “people who have a record of violence” and “stirring up trouble.” Discussing how Obama had criticized people on the left on the same day that cuts were announced to food stamp programs, Beck speculated that the administration was “poking” the left the same way that he “poked” the tea parties. He added that this “makes Barack Obama look like he’s more centrist. But also, you’re poking people who have a record of violence and taking to the streets and stirring up trouble. Hmm. I wonder if there’s anything there.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/11/10]

Beck invokes Holocaust while discussing soda machines: “First they came for the sugary beverages, and I said nothing.” Beck linked a report about city officials in Boston limiting the sale of sodas in city buildings to the Holocaust, saying “First they came for the sugary beverages, and I said nothing.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 9/21/10]

Beck’s advice to Liberty grads: “Shoot to kill.” During his May 15 commencement speech at Liberty University, Beck told graduates that they “have a responsibility” to speak out, or “blood … will be on our hands.” His advice for graduates (as well as his daughter) included “shoot to kill.”

Beck: “I fear a Reichstag moment, a — God forbid — another 9-11, something that will turn this machine on.” During an interview with Newsmax.com in which he discussed opposition to Obama’s Federal Communications Commission policies, Beck said: “I fear an event. I fear a Reichstag moment, a — God forbid — another 9-11, something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced. God help us all.” [Newsmax.com, 10/7/09]

Mixed message: Beck implores his audience to “reject violence”

Though Beck frequently employs overtly violent rhetoric, he regularly urges his audience to “reject violence.” As reported by John Hamilton, Williams said that “Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. … But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.’

Beck warns his audience not to “pick up a gun” or “cause any violence.” Beck addressed his audience on his Fox News show, saying: “Let me tell you something right now. Let me make this very clear for anybody on the left, the right or the middle: If you pick up a gun, if you cause any violence, if you are engaged in a riot, let me promise you now, the republic will be over. Over. Because they need you to do that.” [Glenn Beck, 7/26/10]

Beck: “Reject violence every step of the way.” On his radio program, Beck told his listeners that they were “winning” against “a well-coordinated attack” and that their opponents “need you to become violent.” He continued:

BECK: The minute you become violent, which you’re not going to do — hear me clearly, for the record. Violence will destroy the republic. The person that picks up a gun, a bomb, anything, a knife, a rope, they will destroy the republic. Reject violence every step of the way. You make the first call to the police if you see anyone who you think is plotting, planning, thinking crazy thoughts. You turn them in to police immediately. You will destroy the republic if you do not. Now, could I be any clearer than that? Write it down in your diary because it will be erased in history. [The Glenn Beck Program, 7/26/10]

Beck: “We need to really view ourselves as non-armed, non-violent cells.” On the same broadcast of his radio show, Beck stated: “If they take me down, you have to be standing. And if they take you down, somebody else has to be standing. So we need to really view ourselves as non-armed, non-violent cells.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 7/26/10]

Beck: “The only weapon in our arsenal that we need is God.” Beck has suggested that the government is “poking and prodding” the “crazy teabaggers” in order to incite them to violence. “They need you to be violent,” he said. “They are begging for it. You are being set up. Do not give them what they want.” Then, referring to a report that some congressmen had received death threats after voting in favor of health care reform, Beck implored his viewers, “Do not become them. … It’s exactly what they want.” He concluded by saying that “the only weapon in our arsenal that we need is God.” [Glenn Beck, 3/24/10]

Beck: “You must always be a people of peace.” The same day on the radio, Beck cautioned his listeners: “Let me warn you now, in no uncertain terms. You must always be a people of peace. Always. Unless your life is being threatened. In no uncertain terms, you must always be a people of peace.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 3/24/10]

Beck: “How many times do I have to say ‘peaceful’?” In the middle of comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr., Beck said to his radio listeners: “These are the times when you stand up — when you can stand up peacefully, because if you don’t stand up as you are losing those rights, as the government is growing in power, then, unfortunately, it becomes too late to stand up peacefully. How many times do I have to say ‘peaceful’?” [The Glenn Beck Program, 11/25/09]

Beck: Go to town hall meetings armed with something — “not with guns but with facts.” While suggesting that the Obama administration is trying to destroy him, Beck told his listeners that “there is evil at play” and warned that “unless you come to these town hall meetings armed with something, you’re too easily dismissed.” He later clarified: “By arming you every day, by arming you not with guns but with facts, and you walking into these places armed with facts, the biggest stick you can carry.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/24/09]

Beck: “It is not time to pick up guns” or “blow anything up.” Beck warned his radio audience that “the American way of life is being systematically dismantled and destroyed,” “the republic is in danger,” and “we are entering the most dangerous time in American history.” He then said, “My fellow American, it is not time to pick up guns. It is not time. It is not time to blow anything up.” [The Glenn Beck Program, 8/5/09]

Beck: “If anyone thinks that it would be a good idea to turn violent, think again.” Beck issued a “warning” to his television audience: “If anyone thinks that it would be a good idea to turn violent, think again. It would destroy the republic.” He stated that “just one lunatic, like Timothy McVeigh, could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for” and instructed his audience that it was their “patriotic duty” to stop anyone they heard thinking about becoming violent. [Glenn Beck, 8/3/09]

The list is as astonishing as it is disturbing, especially when it so clearly illustrates that Beck appeared entirely unfazed by the fact that his words, specifically, had been the direct cause of an assassination plot involving workers for non-profit charitable organizations. That Beck has not ceased to use this incendiary —and flagrantly false— rhetoric would seem to indicate a total disregard for even the most basic ethical standards.

No decent American, no one who values our freedom for its potential to allow for the best expression of who Americans are as human individuals and as a community of moral citizens, can pretend, in the face of so much evidence, that there is any constructive role for Mr. Beck to play in our democracy.

He abuses the privilege of his media perch; he abuses the freedom given to media in our society, to degrade and debauch the minds of those who listen; he seems more interested in degrading and corroding the intellectual ability of his audience than he does in being part of anything even resembling a constructive and civil debate in the American public square; his presence on air defames and diminishes the entire media landscape.

The American people should take a stand, and stand with all those who love the true founding principles of this nation —freedom from lies, freedom from tyranny, freedom from the deranged manipulations of powerful figures intent on enriching themselves through lies— and band together, across the political spectrum to represent democracy, to demand a better media, and boycott FOX News and any media outlet that continues to permit Mr. Beck to air his vile and rancorous threats of violence.

There is no place in the media landscape for someone who uses his position to foment violent attacks, hatred and falsehood. Anyone with an ounce of common decency knows this.

Liberal cable news powerhouse Keith Olbermann, one of the staunchest and most successful critics of the Republican party’s politics, has abruptly resigned from his show Countdown, on MSNBC. Olbermann’s success had driven MSNBC, which had dismissed then top-rated host Phil Donohue for criticizing the Iraq war effort, to re-orient its editorial stance toward the more progressive end of the political spectrum.

In the words of one Huffington Post report:

It was Olbermann’s principled and sincere outrage at the warmongering and lies coming from the George W. Bush administration as it pushed the nation into war and recession that established his “brand.” But the fact that Olbermann was a “brand” in the first place points to the intrinsic limitations of corporate media.

That Comcast, which has pushed both as a corporation funding political campaigns and through its programming, a decidedly pro-Republican agenda, was aiming to get rid of Olbermann had long been a source of controversy regarding the cable service’s planned takeover of NBC Universal. Everyone from Forbes to Wired to NewsBusters is speculating about whether it was Comcast driving for a more right-wing network that led to Olbermann’s ouster.

Any media observer can’t help but feel that this incident, the second in as many months involving an MSNBC decision to remove Olbermann, during the controversial merger negotiations with Comcast, reads like the bad old days of one-party, one-wing dominance of the national media, roughly from 2001 through 2005, or rather, spanning the gap between the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the debacle of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Jeff Bercovici, writing for Forbes, puts it this way:

Comcast has its own calculations. An intrinsically conservative corporation, it’s not overly friendly to congenital boat-rockers like Olbermann. In fact, one such individual, a former employee named Barry Nolan, sued Comcast last year, saying the cable operator fired him in order to protect its relationship with News Corp., which owns the Fox News Channel. Nolan had publicly protested an award given to Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’s biggest star. Noting that Olbermann has also frequently feuded with O’Reilly, media critic Dan Kennedy predicted last year, “Keith Olbermann may prove to be Barry Nolan writ large.”

With so many voices already making the correlation between Comcast’s takeover of NBC Universal and the departure of Keith Olbermann, there are really three major questions we need to ask as a society whose individual liberties and democratic sovereignty depend largely on the functioning of a free and independent press:

1. Is the Comcast takeover partly about neutralizing liberal voices?
2. Does the Olbermann cancellation suggest a campaign of harder-line corporate decisions to “balance” the MSNBC brand, or rather, to move the mainstream media deliberately to the right?
3. When corporate interests like Comcast and NewCorp so clearly demonstrate a bias for news presenters that lie, distort and obscure facts on air, are any of us really free?

Free thought in a free society relies on the free flow of information. Comcast’s behavior over the last several years is suggestive of a corporate interest that views ordinary people’s free and open access to information as contrary to its bottom-line interest. Whether it’s the desire to overthrow network neutrality rules (which means, to take over the public’s media space), its own programming decisions, negotiations to box out content competitors, or the NBC Universal takeover process, Comcast seems to privilege its own control of our information more than it does its quality of service as a service provider to the free and independent press.

The New York Post is reporting that Olbermann will be paid the full amount remaining on his 4-year $30 million-dollar contract and that he will likely be required to refrain from hosting any new show in competition with MSNBC for at least 6 months. Comcast denies any involvement in the decision to buy out Olbermann’s contract. Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice issued the following statement:

Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties including MSNBC. We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.

Critics charge that Comcast has been pressuring MSNBC throughout the negotiations and that GE, the parent company of NBC Universal, has been sympathetic to Comcast’s editorial inclinations. Media observers have compared the question of Comcast’s editorial bent to pledges by NewsCorp not to shift the Wall Street Journal’s news division closer to its notoriously right-wing editorial pages: the Wall Street Journal has since undergone a dramatic shift in news content, with far more editorial and tabloid-like reporting than before the NewsCorp takeover.

According to the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:

In the first three months of Murdoch’s stewardship, the Journal’s front page has clearly shifted focus, de-emphasizing business coverage that was the franchise, while placing much more emphasis on domestic politics and devoting more attention to international issues. But it is not, at least not yet, as broad as the New York Times on the same days.

Under the Murdoch regime, the single biggest change in front-page coverage occurred with politics and the presidential campaign. From Dec. 13, 2007 through March 13, 2008, coverage more than tripled, jumping to 18% of the newshole compared with 5% in the four months before the ownership change.

The Journal’s coverage of key issues relevant to Democratic party leadership on the economy, such as the state of healthcare and the costs of transportation (seen as a failing of Bush-era policies) was reduced almost to zero, while campaign coverage favorable to the Republican party was dramatically increased. Again, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

One clear example of the changing news agenda was the Journal’s front page on April 21 [2008], a day before the Pennsylvania primary. The paper led with a package of two campaign stories under the headline, “Latest Attacks Roil Democrats.” One story recalled Barack Obama’s political education as a Chicago politician and the other chronicled the growing concerns of Democratic Party leaders about the bitter primary battle.

The changes were both subtle and dramatic. Any reader inclined to favor Republican-party policies might not notice the shift, because the connection between the financial sector and Republican party interests in free-market ideology remained to some degree harmonious, but the editorializing inherent in the news decisions relating to front-page coverage and campaign analysis were clear to any neutral observer.

There was a clear inclination to privilege stories, issues, headlines and commentary, closer in tenor and focus to the ideology of the Republican party, the FOX News channel and the corporate directors of NewsCorp, the new parent company. In the days leading up to the takeover of DowJones, watchdog groups had warned about indirect manipulation of the news content, through a “culture” that would make news executives worry about the career consequences of not shifting the paper’s news division to a more ideological focus.

According to Politco:

On air, Olbermann hinted that he had just learned of the end of his show Friday, and suggested his departure was not voluntary. “I think the same fantasy popped into the head of everybody in my business who has ever been told what I have been told: this will be the last edition of your show,” he said.

“You go to the scene from the movie ‘Network,’ complete with the pajamas and the raincoat, and go off on a verbal journey of unutterable vision and you insist upon Peter Finch’s gutteral resonance and you will the viewer to go to the window, open it, stick out his head and yell,” he continued. “You know the rest. In the mundane world of television goodbyes, reality is laughably uncooperative.”

His final sign-off was his signature homage to Edward R. Murrow, a simple “Good night, and good luck.”

The suggestion that Olbermann had been informed only at the last minute of the now disturbingly more common “frogmarch” corporate dismissal —you’re out and we’ll escort you from the building, etc.— of long-time, valuable employees, raises serious questions about the ethical integrity of the corporate management of the network, and of course about whether anyone, at any level, has been applying pressure to lean in the direction of Comcast’s well-known corporate ideology.

At the very least, the snap decision, given the timing, should raise enough suspicion to warrant a rethinking of the FCC’s approval of the Comcast takeover of NBC Universal. Too many figures inside and outside the process seem to be perceiving the same trend: a deliberate targetting of the network’s most successful presenter, escalating in concert with the calendar of the merger.

The decision to permit the deal should be immediately suspended, while a thorough investigation is undertaken. Some media observers say Comcast and other access providers are too big and need to be charged with anti-trust violations and broken up. At the very least, the Olbermann affair should put the merger on indefinite hold, until legally binding guarantees can be won from Comcast that its corporate board will never engage in editorial or programming decisions.

UPDATE, 2:34 pm EST: The New  Yorker has joined in speculation Keith Olbermann would either turn up at one of MSNBC’s chief rivals —CNN or FOX News Channel— or possibly use the funds he has gained in the buyout of his contract to launch a new media venture of his own. There is certainly an appetite for something like that on the liberal side of the political spectrum, and speculation has already begun regarding which publications, online media or cable channels might join an Olbermann-led venture.

Slate.com, an MSNBC publication, is reporting:

Without warning, Keith Olbermann ended his MSNBC news show with a six-minute farewell sign-off declaring it would be his last Countdown. Olbermann hinted the decision wasn’t mutual, noting he had been “told” it would be his last show. The announcement came out of the blue, even surprising Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall who was a guest at the beginning of the show and says he didn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t the only one. The decision was kept so quiet that many in the network didn’t know and MSNBC was still running promos for Olbermann an hour after he said goodbye.

There have been reports there were ongoing “severance” negotiations for several weeks, leading up to the decision. But the hint that Olbermann was not in agreement with the decision to end his tenure at MSNBC continue to raise doubts about the motivations for the move and whether personal or political animus drove NBC Universal executives to move to end his contract for Countdown, the media franchise he built and which revived the flagging ratings of the MSNBC network.

UPDATE, 2:48 pm EST: The Gothamist reports on vitriolic rhetoric of New York Post, owned by FOX News’ parent company, which celebrated the removal of one of FOX News’ most successful critics. The tabloid rag once more exemplified the sordid underbelly of gossip journalism, stooping to publishing ad hominem insults like: “broadcast blowhard,” “pontificating pundit,” “unemployed Uberdork,” and “garrulous gasbag”.

Reports have also surfaced suggesting that intensely pro-Republican Comcast chairman Brian Roberts chose to use the language of armed combat, when asked what would happen if Olbermann, while working for Comcast-owned NBC Universal, continued to vehemently criticize Republicans in Congress. Roberts reportedly said: “Let’s have that conversation in 12 months, when we’re playing with live ammo”, suggesting either a planned attack on Olbermann or a deliberate escalation of tensions, aimed at helping Republicans.

There are growing concerns that the Olbermann affair is just one of a series of incidents hinting at a new era of corporate media censorship and biased news reporting. One recent case was comedienne Joan Rivers, who says she was barred from appearing on FOX News after saying of Sarah Palin: “They’re right to blame Sarah for the shootings,” adding: “Go look at her website… This woman is just stupid and a threat.”

Whether the FOX News network was retaliating against Rivers for criticizing one of its media stars, or because the network itself has actively encouraged the use of extreme rhetoric, even going as far as to fund and help organize rallies promoting the so-called Tea Party and spreading partisan smears against Democratic policies, is not known.

China’s president Hu Jintao is visiting the United States and will be the focus of several state-level functions, including a full state dinner and a special luncheon hosted by the vice president, Joe Biden. In the face of US demands that China remove rate controls and allow its currency to appreciate, Pres. Hu has said the yuan should be thought of as the world’s currency standard, with other currencies priced against its value.

Is Pres. Hu so tone-deaf as to pave the way for a lavish state visit —where major issues of economics, security, human rights and more, will be discussed— with a call to sideline the United States’ dollar as the leading guide for international trade valuations? Or is this just an attempt to raise the stakes, put pressure on the US and bargain China’s way out of US pressure to let the yuan appreciate?

The US has been pressuring China to loosen its control of yuan valuations and allow the marketplace to drive the value of the yuan higher. The effect would be to reduce the US trade deficit with China, but China is resisting the move, because it could undermine Chinese exports and manufacturing, the main drivers of its economic boom. Hu may be raising the stakes of the debate deliberately, in order to persuade the US to accept something less.

Still, in the week preceding the visit, the yuan has appreciated, and is expected to continue, which may be, in part, a sign that China is responding to the pressure and/or interested in collaborating with its biggest trading partner. While some in the US have painted China as a liability to the US, owning too much debt and ready to “call it in”, others say the relationship is symbiotic, so much so that China cannot act in a way that would harm US buying power.

Even as GM is making major inroads in the Chinese auto market, Chinese firms are buying up American green energy businesses, ranging from manufacturing to wind farms and energy companies. In fact, while Pres. Obama’s Recovery Act will over its full life devote more funding to clean energy than all previous administrations combined —$80 billion—, China has become the global leader in funding, with $230 billion.

If Hu’s call for a global economy rooted in the value of the yuan is a diplomatic gambit, it is in keeping with China’s history of raising the stakes before asking allies and/or opponents to settle for less. The US has been known to do the same, and it can be expected the Obama administration was ready for such a maneuver, though perhaps as startled as anyone else by Hu’s aggressiveness on this point.

China has been hoping to bargain over another point, which is US praise for jailed Chinese democracy activist and 2010 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo. Pres. Obama has been “forward leaning” —in the words of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs— in his support of Liu, adding that “he should be free, that he certainly should be free to go Oslo and accept his prize”.

Liu was not allowed to travel to Oslo, remains in jail, and even his wife has been subject to house arrest and prohibited from traveling to receive the award. Mr. Liu was one of the framers of the Charter ’08 reform program, a kind of pro-democracy constitution whose release was timed to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games. China treats Liu and the Charter ’08 movement as guilty of sedition.

Pres. Obama and Sec. of State Clinton are both expected to press Hu and his diplomatic corps on the need to advance human rights in China, but both are also cited as indicating that they cannot let deep differences on those issues stall urgent negotiations on nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, or trade issues relating to China’s potential as a market for US goods.

The following is an official transcript of remarks by the President at a memorial service for the victims of the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, as delivered at the McKale Memorial Center at the University of Arizona, in Tucson:

6:43 P.M. MST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Please, please be seated. (Applause.)

To the families of those we’ve lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants who are gathered here, the people of Tucson and the people of Arizona: I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today and will stand by you tomorrow. (Applause.)

There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: The hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy will pull through. (Applause.)

Scripture tells us:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.

On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech. (Applause.) They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders –- representatives of the people answering questions to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns back to our nation’s capital. Gabby called it “Congress on Your Corner” -– just an updated version of government of and by and for the people. (Applause.)

And that quintessentially American scene, that was the scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets. And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday –- they, too, represented what is best in us, what is best in America. (Applause.)

Judge John Roll served our legal system for nearly 40 years. (Applause.) A graduate of this university and a graduate of this law school — (applause) — Judge Roll was recommended for the federal bench by John McCain 20 years ago — (applause) — appointed by President George H.W. Bush and rose to become Arizona’s chief federal judge. (Applause.)

His colleagues described him as the hardest-working judge within the Ninth Circuit. He was on his way back from attending Mass, as he did every day, when he decided to stop by and say hi to his representative. John is survived by his loving wife, Maureen, his three sons and his five beautiful grandchildren. (Applause.)

George and Dorothy Morris -– “Dot” to her friends -– were high school sweethearts who got married and had two daughters. They did everything together — traveling the open road in their RV, enjoying what their friends called a 50-year honeymoon. Saturday morning, they went by the Safeway to hear what their congresswoman had to say. When gunfire rang out, George, a former Marine, instinctively tried to shield his wife. (Applause.) Both were shot. Dot passed away.

A New Jersey native, Phyllis Schneck retired to Tucson to beat the snow. But in the summer, she would return East, where her world revolved around her three children, her seven grandchildren and 2-year-old great-granddaughter. A gifted quilter, she’d often work under a favorite tree, or sometimes she’d sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants — (laughter) — to give out at the church where she volunteered. A Republican, she took a liking to Gabby, and wanted to get to know her better. (Applause.)

Dorwan and Mavy Stoddard grew up in Tucson together -– about 70 years ago. They moved apart and started their own respective families. But after both were widowed they found their way back here, to, as one of Mavy’s daughters put it, “be boyfriend and girlfriend again.” (Laughter.)

When they weren’t out on the road in their motor home, you could find them just up the road, helping folks in need at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ. A retired construction worker, Dorwan spent his spare time fixing up the church along with his dog, Tux. His final act of selflessness was to dive on top of his wife, sacrificing his life for hers. (Applause.)

Everything — everything — Gabe Zimmerman did, he did with passion. (Applause.) But his true passion was helping people. As Gabby’s outreach director, he made the cares of thousands of her constituents his own, seeing to it that seniors got the Medicare benefits that they had earned, that veterans got the medals and the care that they deserved, that government was working for ordinary folks. He died doing what he loved -– talking with people and seeing how he could help. And Gabe is survived by his parents, Ross and Emily, his brother, Ben, and his fiancée, Kelly, who he planned to marry next year. (Applause.)

And then there is nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. Christina was an A student; she was a dancer; she was a gymnast; she was a swimmer. She decided that she wanted to be the first woman to play in the Major Leagues, and as the only girl on her Little League team, no one put it past her. (Applause.)

She showed an appreciation for life uncommon for a girl her age. She’d remind her mother, “We are so blessed. We have the best life.” And she’d pay those blessings back by participating in a charity that helped children who were less fortunate.

Our hearts are broken by their sudden passing. Our hearts are broken -– and yet, our hearts also have reason for fullness.
Our hearts are full of hope and thanks for the 13 Americans who survived the shooting, including the congresswoman many of them went to see on Saturday.

I have just come from the University Medical Center, just a mile from here, where our friend Gabby courageously fights to recover even as we speak. And I want to tell you — her husband Mark is here and he allows me to share this with you — right after we went to visit, a few minutes after we left her room and some of her colleagues in Congress were in the room, Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.) Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.)

Gabby opened her eyes. Gabby opened her eyes, so I can tell you she knows we are here. She knows we love her. And she knows that we are rooting for her through what is undoubtedly going to be a difficult journey. We are there for her. (Applause.)

Our hearts are full of thanks for that good news, and our hearts are full of gratitude for those who saved others. We are grateful to Daniel Hernandez — (applause) — a volunteer in Gabby’s office. (Applause.)

And, Daniel, I’m sorry, you may deny it, but we’ve decided you are a hero because — (applause) — you ran through the chaos to minister to your boss, and tended to her wounds and helped keep her alive. (Applause.)

We are grateful to the men who tackled the gunman as he stopped to reload. (Applause.) Right over there. (Applause.) We are grateful for petite Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away the killer’s ammunition, and undoubtedly saved some lives. (Applause.) And we are grateful for the doctors and nurses and first responders who worked wonders to heal those who’d been hurt. We are grateful to them. (Applause.)

These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle. They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength. Heroism is here, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, all around us, just waiting to be summoned -– as it was on Saturday morning. Their actions, their selflessness poses a challenge to each of us. It raises a question of what, beyond prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. (Applause.)

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “When I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. (Applause.) But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. (Applause.) That we cannot do. (Applause.) That we cannot do.

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together. (Applause.)

After all, that’s what most of us do when we lose somebody in our family -– especially if the loss is unexpected. We’re shaken out of our routines. We’re forced to look inward. We reflect on the past: Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices that they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in a while but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. (Applause.)

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we’re doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved — (applause)– and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better. (Applause.)

And that process — that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.

For those who were harmed, those who were killed –- they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong. (Applause.) We may not have known them personally, but surely we see ourselves in them. In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners. Phyllis –- she’s our mom or our grandma; Gabe our brother or son. (Applause.) In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America’s fidelity to the law. (Applause.)

And in Gabby — in Gabby, we see a reflection of our public-spiritedness; that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union. (Applause.)

And in Christina — in Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic, so full of magic. So deserving of our love. And so deserving of our good example.

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate — as it should — let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. (Applause.) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud. (Applause.)

We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations. (Applause.)

They believed — they believed, and I believe that we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved life here –- they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us. (Applause.)

And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. (Applause.)

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. (Applause.)

Imagine — imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations. (Applause.)

As has already been mentioned, Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called “Faces of Hope.” On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child’s life. “I hope you help those in need,” read one. “I hope you know all the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart.” (Applause.) “I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

If there are rain puddles in Heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. (Applause.) And here on this Earth — here on this Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and we commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

END 7:17 P.M. MST

George Will today has written a vicious criticism of any attempt to examine whether political rhetoric over the last election cycle was too violent, too full of vitriol and hostility. He flippantly leads with the remark that “It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology.” Will argues that conservatives who used inflammatory distortions and thinly veiled threats of violence should not be scrutinized for demonizing others, then leads with a demonization of the entire field of sociology as made up of “half-baked explanations”.

Will is just the latest in a wide array of conservative pundits seeking to provide rhetorical cover for inexcusably violent and vitriolic political rhetoric, by attacking progressives and people offended by mass murder. The first question should be not whether there is some validity to what Will argues, but rather why the extreme defensiveness of so many conservatives to the criticism of the worst offenders?

George Will is not a vitriolic hate-monger. He did not spend the years 2007-2010 selling fear and animosity. He is a thoughtful, intellectual conservative, who often takes positions that defy Republican dogma, because he prefers to use facts and gravitate toward moderation in language. But he is driven, somehow, to form part of the red wall of silence that is now demanding that no criticism of any kind fall on the shoulders of radical partisans who have deliberately used the language of war, hunting and political violence, to further their partisan aims.

Sarah Palin’s PAC has taken down the website where it posted her infamous crosshairs-emblazoned Congressional hit-list, and now argues the crosshairs were not intended as a gunsight. In fact, they were, they were described as such, and the words “sights”, “crosshairs”, “target”, and “take out” were repeatedly used to sell the idea behind that map, that angry voters should eliminate opposition to the views promoted by Palin and her allies.

Yesterday, malice-mongers Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh attacked liberals for being outraged at the use of hate-speech and violent rhetoric. Beck then spoke of the need to take action before it’s too late to stop the fall of the Republic, while asking his listeners to use the gold-pawning business that funds his programs. Beck and Limbaugh were joined, incredibly, by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in attacking Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who railed against vitriolic rhetoric and violent language in the 2010 campaign, on the day of the shooting.

They defended their partisan interest by accusing Dupnik of being a rabid partisan, and they politicized the entire debate by accusing Dupnik of politicizing the massacre. Dupnik said last night that he has a legal obligation to raise awareness about the degradation of American political rhetoric, because it makes life more dangerous for the people he is sworn to protect and threatens to undermine their access to a truly open and democratic government.

Will waxes philosophical, however, charging that the reflex to challenge the legitimacy of violent rhetoric stems from “a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds”, which he describes as a “craving … for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience”. Will details the tendency of primitive cultures to turn to deities to explain the awesome in nature, and suggests that this tendency is unique to animist or polytheistic faiths.

Will also ties into the wrong thread, arguing that the whole criticism of violent rhetoric amounts to saying, cheaply, that “The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today’s (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism,’climate of hate.’” The problem with this facile criticism is that it disingenuously ignores the real meaning of the question of violent rhetoric: the argument is not that Loughner was driven by a specific incident of vitriol or defamation; the argument is that people in public life should not engage in the type of intellectual distortion, rabid defamation and hate-speech that characterizes someone like Loughner.

Whether or not Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or the Tea Party Express, were a direct and concrete inspiration for the Tucson attacker, the use of rhetoric designed to provoke violently emotional reactions, hatred and political division, is a gross disservice to our nation, to our democracy and to the freedom of our people to shape the fate of their own future. Defamation is not debate; malice is not argument; character assassination is not service.

Will very astutely bends the line of pseudo-pscyhology he is using to defend the indefensible, arguing that “demystification” is what made “real science” possible, and positioning “the social sciences” somewhere between “real science” and the “modern characteristic” of a “craving” for demystification. He then goes on to suggest that it is this modern demystification and the misuse of the social sciences —read: sociology, psychology and pseudo-psychology a la George F. Will— conspire to empower “charlatans” to manipulate tragedies like the Tucson attack for ideological gain.

While Will is right to point out that the lust for demystification sometimes results in the shaping of flawed arguments, he is wrong to argue against the criticism —fair or unfair— of conservatives for reflexive vitriol by blaming what he perceives as the reflexive manipulation of political tragedy for ideological purposes on ideological opponents, using vitriolic language. Will is committing the very intellectual sin he assigns to those who criticize violent rhetoric as inexcusable and reckless.

Will engages in revisionist history of astonishing proportions, saying liberals refuse to accept that Kennedy’s killer was a lone gunman whose motives were inexplicable, referring to Oswald as “a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro”. Whatever Oswald’s political ideology, it is known he went to Russia in the course of service to the American government, and —whether or not you subscribe to conspiracy theories— every investigation into the assassination has shown Oswald had connections to the “anti-Castro Cuban” movement, in several states.

George Will’s defense of indefensibly violent and defamatory rhetoric is a maze of distortions: he argues that no one should be allowed to question the validity of defamatory rhetoric, because it is wrong to defame conservatives who use defamatory rhetoric by questioning what they do; he argues that any attempt to call for a more civil public discourse is ideological superstition; he argues that conservatives have a right to use violent rhetoric, but liberals have no right to express their visceral revulsion to such ugly methods.

He says that criticism of hateful language is “a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas” and alleges that “It expresses limitless contempt for the American people”. Will is, whether knowingly or not, engaging in the same rhetoric of escalation and vitriol, calling liberals enemies of the people and falsely alleging that it is this phantom campaign against “the American people” —by which Will means conservatives and Republicans— that led to a Republican wave in the 2010 midterm elections.

Why does Mr. Will see fit to give moral cover to immoral distortions? Why does he use his bully(ish) pulpit at the Washington Post to defame all non-conservatives, social scientists and critics of hate-speech? Why does he attempt to rewrite the history of political assassinations in the United States, painting every last one as a lone gunman with non-rightist tendencies? Why —honest people must ask— does someone in George Will’s position feel a need to call people asking for calm “charlatans” and suggest that political arguments against hate-speech and guns constitute a cynical use of a tragedy that could have been prevented?

It could be that Will views the situation as making conservative activists who have engaged in violent rhetoric look bad. It could be that he is concerned the use of that rhetoric may cause a public-opinion trend away from the policies he supports which are also, by chance, supported by individuals and groups that use abusive rhetoric. It could be that Mr. Will feels an allegiance to a political tribe, and he sees that tribe suffering withering criticism from many quarters, so he hopes to return the favor and try to isolate liberals, accusing them of politicizing a national tragedy.

Whatever the motivation, whatever the explanation —we dare not attempt to demystify Mr. Will’s craving to distort the intellectual landscape of our discourse— his piece “The charlatans’ response to the Tucson tragedy” is a maze of distortions and a very thoughtful defamation of millions of Americans who have a visceral aversion to violent rhetoric, character assassination and political distortions, and a distraction aimed at “avoiding engagement with ideas”.

We should stay focused on the very serious question about whether our discourse honors or undermines the quality and the resilience of our democratic process. We should be better than those baser urges Mr. Will seems so determined to defend against even the slightest criticism. The Tucson shooter may be a madman, but that does not retroactively free those who rely on violent rhetoric from responsibility for what their language does to degrade our democracy.

ThoughtPossible.com :: In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people, six of whom have already, tragically, died from their injuries, the national political establishment (media, pressure groups and elected officials) has turned its attention to the perils of extremist and vitriolic rhetoric. We are being asked to consider whether the use of metaphorical violence (putting Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs, which both Sarah Palin and her 2010 opponent did) leads to actual violence, and while direct responsibility is not being alleged, the ethical obligation to honor our democracy with civil discourse must be considered.

There is no question that specific individuals and specific organizations have very consistently ratcheted up the vitriol and hostility in our political rhetoric, for personal and partisan gain. Former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) yesterday repeated his criticism of the last year of his party’s near religious commitment to extremist rhetorical distortions and misleading statements about Pres. Obama and the nature of the reform legislation he and the Democrats in Congress have passed.

He urged “even the staunchest Republicans” to have the integrity and the civility to say “We are all Democrats today, for Gabby”. And while civility has been the watchword, and we have heard outraged disdain for the shooter and for anyone who believes this kind of action is legitimate, in concept or in action, political strategists have already begun seeking to defend individual politicians and specific conservative groups against the rhetorical “attack” that their rhetoric has been too violent and extreme.

So let’s say it clearly and resoundingly, and let’s all say it defiantly, together: THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH VITRIOLIC DISTORTIONS OR HATE-SPEECH ARE JUSTIFIABLE; THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH THREATS OF VIOLENCE, METAPHORICAL OR LITERAL ARE EXCUSABLE.

People who have ideas and a will to serve have no time and no use for such disgusting distortions, and people of conscience know this. However heated political debate may become, metaphor ceases to be useful when it becomes outright distortion. Some politicians have chosen to view extremist distortions as politically expedient, even openly calling for armed rebellion, to capitalize on populist anger and anti-establishment feeling. But that political expediency comes with a cost.

One election may be easier to win if such ideas spread at the right pace over the right landscape, but the landscape will then become a distorted form of what we once hoped were its best aspirations, possibly in dangerous ways. False claims can turn out to hurt those who make them, when the fact that they were false finally gets through to the people whose votes decide the shape and direction of government.

To honor the principled, and always civil service of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the tragic sacrifice of her community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman, federal district Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green and the other victims of this disgusting atrocity, let’s commit ourselves to marginalizing any public figure who uses lies, distortions, hate-speech, or the language of incitement, to defame his or her opponents and to manipulate the American people. Their actions are a stain on our democracy and a perversion or our country’s great spirit.

Let’s commit to being principled and coherent in our devotion to building a more perfect civil order, a system of debate and idea-sharing aimed at constructing pragmatic responses to real-world problems. Let’s commit to being better than any ideology, better than any tribalist camp, better than any Balkanizing defamation, better than the sordid temptations of internecine conflict that threaten to undermine the meaning and the quality of public service to an open democracy.

• CBS News: “Schieffer: Rhetoric and Its Consequences”
  (Says Violence Stirred by Inflammatory Political Discourse Endangers Our Way of Life)
• Huffington Post: “Our Leaders Must Renounce the Ideology of Political Violence”
  (The time has come for political leaders of both parties, whether liberal or conservative, to renounce the ideology of political violence. Ideas have consequences. The idea that “the guys with the guns make the rules” has inevitable consequences that can no longer be tolerated)
• CBS News: “Dem: Tone Down the Political Rhetoric”
  (Says Hoyer: Political Environment Getting Worrying, Attack on Giffords Is an Attack on Democracy)
• CafeSentido: “Former Republican Rep. Inglis says ‘We’re all Democrats today’”
  (Inglis: “I hope what even the staunchest Republican could say is, ‘We’re all Democrats today for Gabby,’ and let’s just come together as a nation and figure out a way to get out of these problems”)
• The Examiner: “AZ shooter is a nutjob, but violent rhetoric still matters”
  (“[I]t would be naive to assume that nutjobs are immune to the influence of violent rhetoric.  On the contrary, they are likely the most gullible, malleable, and primed to be incited to violent action.”)
• ThoughtPossible: “McCain Calls Obama ‘Decent Family Man’, Demands Civility” (2008)
  (“[McCain] called on his supporters to be “respectful”, said that’s what this campaign was supposed to be about, a respectful debate of the issues by two qualified individuals.”)
• CafeSentido: “Is Glenn Beck Deliberately Inciting Violent Acts Against Progressives?”
  (“Glenn Beck has a moral obligation to answer the question: what does he aim to achieve with this campaign of libel and incitement? Is he aiming to inspire desperate people to desperate action? Is he aiming to make ordinary people into desperate radicals?”)

Christina-Taylor Green was born on 11 September 2001, a day of national tragedy for the United States, and she died yesterday in Tucson, in a hail of gunfire, as a result of the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Christina-Taylor was seen by her family as a sign of hope, something beautiful born in the midst of a terrible tragedy.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Her mother said her daughter was aware of the inequities in the world. “She was all about helping people and being involved. It’s so tragic. She went to learn today and then someone with so much hatred in their heart took the lives of innocent people.”

Christina-Taylor’s father, John Green, told the newspaper his daughter had just been elected to the student council at Mesa Verde Elementary School and had been interested in politics.

Christina-Taylor went to the shopping mall where the shooting occurred with a neighbor who thought the 9-year-old girl would enjoy the opportunity to meet Congresswoman. What was supposed to be a warm and enthralling education in community-level civics turned into the tragic and inexcusable end to a promising young life.

SMH also reported “Christina-Taylor loved ballet, gymnastics, animals and, unsurprisingly, given her pedigree, was a keen baseball player – the only girl on a team called the Pirates, where she played second base. Her father is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers and her grandfather, Dallas Green, managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1980 World Series championship.”

Frank McCourt, owner of the Dodgers, said in response to Christina-Taylor Green’s death, “‘We lost a member of the Dodgers family today.” The 9-year-old girl’s death has added a perplexing layer to this tragedy, as the nation attempts to grapple with how to prevent firearms like the one used yesterday from destroying lives by adding such destructive force to the mental instability of deranged individuals.

Christina-Taylor Green will be remembered as an example of what is best in our nation, the hope that people of character and with strong minds will take an interest in the debate that occurs between people in the public sphere, and commit their innocence and their talent to helping to build a better future.

Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, of South Carolina, said the climate of hostile and vitriolic rhetoric that has overtaken much of the right is partly to blame for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Inglis urged his fellow Republicans to honor the principled public service of Giffords, saying “I hope what even the staunchest Republican could say is, ‘We’re all Democrats today for Gabby,’ and let’s just come together as a nation and figure out a way to get out of these problems”.

Inglis served on the House science committee with Giffords, and the two became friends. Inglis is familiar with the extremism promoted by overheated rhetoric. As reported by NPR:

By any measure, Inglis is a solid conservative. When he was first elected to Congress in 1992, Congressional Quarterly described him as revolutionary. He’s won six congressional elections and has a lifetime rating of 93 from the American Conservative Union.

Yet he’s become unpopular among his Republican colleagues for saying he believes in the science of climate change and for refusing to call President Obama a socialist.

He says the Republican party has been overtaken by a movement that seeks to redefine conservatism, but which operates through demagoguery, not service. Many prominent Republicans have adopted the view that it is politically expedient to promote, condone or even employ vitriolic distortions, but Inglis says “We’ve wasted a lot of time with saying things that just aren’t true about President Obama”.

Inglis was punished at the polls for speaking up for truth, civility and principled conservative service. According to NPR:

The attacks on Obama strike a chord with Inglis because he was part of a group of Republicans who went after President Clinton in the ’90s. Today, he says his attacks on Clinton were sins.

For Inglis, the gap between working honestly to serve the public interest and using a concerted campaign of lies to disdain and undermine the nation’s highest elected official is too clear to ignore. He now says his attacks on Clinton were “not healthy for my soul”. In November, he urged his party to recognize the need to work for consensus, and observed “It’d be better if we were pulling together rather than tearing apart.”

His words seem prescient, in retrospect. There is no place in true democracy for hate-speech, threats of violence, metaphors involving medieval acts, execution or bloody rebellion. People with solutions have no cause and no time for such wasteful and reckless words. Inglis says the extremist tirades of 2010 are like the bloodlust of the French revolution, a misguided violence doomed to collapse on itself. “And hopefully we get back as quickly as possible to the American struggle for independence,” he urged.

On Tuesday, Pres. Obama signed a raft of new legislation passed during the lame duck session of the 111th Congress. The huge number of signings capped a complicated two-year period of historic achievements and unprecedented Senate obstruction. Here’s a comprehensive list of the new laws Pres. Obama signed on the last day before the Republicans are sworn in as the new majority in the House of Representatives, from the White House:

On Tuesday, January 04, 2011, the President signed into law:

H.R. 81, the “Shark Conservation Act of 2010 and International Fisheries Agreement Clarification Act,” which generally prohibits the removal of shark fins at sea and amends certain laws related to international fisheries;

H.R. 628, which establishes a pilot program regarding the adjudication cases where patent or plant variety protection issues are to be decided;

H.R. 1107, which restates and reorganizes the public contract laws of the United States in Title 41, United Sates Code;

H.R. 1746, the “Predisaster Hazard Mitigation Act of 2010,” which authorizes appropriations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program for FYs 2011-2013;

H.R. 2142, the “GPRA Modernization Act of 2010,” which amends the Government Performance and Results Act to establish a Federal government performance plan;

H.R. 2751, the “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act,” which modernizes the food safety system to better prevent food-borne illness and better respond to outbreaks;

H.R. 4445, the “Indian Pueblo Cultural Center Clarification Act,” which repeals a restriction on the treatment of certain lands held in trust for Indian Pueblos in New Mexico;

H.R. 4602, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the Emil Bolas Post Office;

H.R. 4748, the “Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy Act of 2010,” which requires the Office of National Drug Control Policy to develop a Northern Boarder Counternarcotics Strategy;

H.R. 4973, the “National Wildlife Refuge Volunteer Improvement Act of 2010,” which reauthorizes and amends authorities relating to volunteer programs and community partnerships for national wildlife refuges;

H.R. 5116, the “America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (America COMPETES) Reauthorization Act of 2010,” which reauthorizes various programs intended to strengthen research and education in the United States related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics;

H.R. 5133, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill and Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz Post Office Building;

H.R. 5470, which excludes specified external power supplies from certain energy efficiency standards required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act;

H.R. 5605, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the George C. Marshall Post Office;

H.R. 5606, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the James M. “Jimmy” Stewart Post Office Building;

H.R. 5655, which designates the Little River Branch facility of the United States Postal Service as the Jesse J. McCrary, Jr. Post Office;

H.R. 5809, the “Diesel Emissions Reduction Act of 2010,” which modifies and reauthorizes through FY 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency’s Diesel Emissions Reduction Program;

H.R. 5877, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the Lance Corporal Alexander Scott Arredondo, United States Marine Corps Post Office Building;

H.R. 5901, which authorizes the U.S. Tax Court to appoint employees under a personnel management system that includes the merit system principles and prohibitions on personnel practices;

H.R. 6392, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the Colonel George Juskalian Post Office Building;

H.R. 6400, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the Earl Wilson, Jr. Post Office;

H.R. 6412, the “Access to Criminal History Records for State Sentencing Commissions Act of 2010,” which requires the Department of Justice to exchange records and information with State sentencing commissions;

H.R. 6510, which directs the General Services Administration to convey to the Military Museum of Texas the parcel of real property in Houston, Texas, on which the museum is located;

H.R. 6533, the “Local Community Radio Act of 2010,” which modifies current restrictions on low-power FM radio stations;

S. 118, the “Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Act of 2010,” which amends financing and project operation requirements for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s program to allow for increased housing opportunities for low-income seniors;

S. 841, the “Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010,” regarding pedestrian safety related to motor vehicles;

S. 1481, the “Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act of 2010,” which amends financing and project operation requirements for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s program for low income individuals with disabilities;

S. 3036, the “National Alzheimer’s Project Act,” which establishes a National Alzheimer’s Project within the Department of Health and Human Services and an advisory council on Alzheimer’s research, care, and services;

S. 3243, the “Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010,” which requires the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that all applicants for law enforcement positions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) receive polygraph examinations;

S. 3447, the “Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2010,” which amends the Post-9/11 GI Bill, and other educational assistance programs for veterans;

S. 3481, which clarifies the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay reasonable service charges to a State or local government to address stormwater pollution from Federal properties;

S. 3592, which designates a facility of the United States Postal Service as the First Lieutenant Robert Wilson Collins Post Office Building;

S. 3874, the “Reduction of Lead in Drinking Water Act,” which modifies the Safe Drinking Water Act definition of “lead free” with regard to pipes, pipe fittings, plumbing fittings, and fixtures;

S. 3903, which authorizes 99-year leases on land held in trust for the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in the State of New Mexico; and

S. 4036, which amends authorities of the National Credit Union Administration.

Glen Beck has always had a penchant for the outrageous, the egregious, the outright lie. He has made a career of smears, distortions, even verging on hate-rhetoric. His absurd assertion that his white followers should “take back the civil rights movement”, a phrase whose meaning no one could claim to fully understand, was perhaps a sign of near psychotic hubris. But his most recent “Puppetmaster” series, obsessively defaming George Soros, Holocaust survivor, billionaire philanthropist and democracy activist, as a ‘Nazi’ is a sign that Fox News has left all semblance of morality behind.

The fake news station —which in 2010 literally rebranded itself as the televisual arm of the Republican party, hosting fundraisers on and off-air, encouraging conservative candidates to speak to no one else, and committing itself to the hard work of smearing any and all Democratic candidates that might be giving a Republican anywhere a run for his or her money— has now committed itself, in its support for Beck’s disgusting libel campaign against the world’s leading anti-totalitarian philanthropist, to being the media home for hate-mongering.

The number of lies told in Beck’s smear campaign against Soros is shocking. He even goes as far as to allege that a 13-year-old Jewish child, whose friends and family are systematically persecuted by the Nazis and their nationalist-fascist minions in Hungary, somehow helped to send fellow Jews to the death camps. This is an outrageous lie of the worst kind, and a distortion Beck should be terrified to make on air, in a country that does not play fast and loose with Holocaust history.

But of course, he is not making the statement on air in a country that does not play fast and loose with Holocaust history. He’s making the statement in the bitter fog of Fox News commentary, which is at best a vile distortion of the America in which it pretends to play a constructive role. That Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are not throwing Beck to the proverbial wolves for this screed of savage libel, rife with distortions of Holocaust history and defamation of one of its victims, serves only to illustrate how little truth of any kind matters to them.

Whatever Fox News is, it is not a news operation. It is not in the business of relaying facts or giving “fair and balanced” coverage of any topic. In fact, it’s possible to say they are able to get away with such egregious behavior because everyone knows Fox News harbors no pretense whatsoever to being about news or journalism or fairness or anything decent. They are what they are and like any pathological villain, it’s just too charming to be truly cast out from decent society.

But this particular pack of lies is emblematic of something much deeper and more sinister than obsessive partisanship. It’s emblematic of a network that seems to fancy itself the place on air for systematic sabotage of the American public sphere and programmatic brainwashing of its less informed viewers. What worked with ACORN just might work with Soros, and so lie upon lie upon lie is the way to go.

Fox News has faced no legal or popular consequences for its absurd and sordid smear campaign against ACORN, a group that worked tirelessly to help the poor find work and to rebuild communities shattered by hard economic times, a charity organization guilty of NOT ONE of the crimes relentlessly alleged by a coordinated onslaught from Fox News commentators. ACORN is all but defunct now, having had to file for bankruptcy, despite being the victim of nothing more than a deliberate smear campaign from Fox News and its network of pseudo-reporters.

A source in the New York District Attorney’s office told the Daily News that “They edited the tape to meet their agenda”. There was no substance to the insane allegations made by a small cohort of fantasists linked to Andrew Breitbart and the conservative media engine. It was an ambush intended to undermine the work of a group that for four decades has worked to win living wages for underprivileged workers, and stable living conditions for poor and working families.

As ACORN’s CEO said in March, it was “a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era”, and the assault was carried out by Fox News, in a deliberate attempt to undermine an organization that was helping to get poor and marginalized people registered to vote (seen as bad for the Republican party, which often treats such people as enemies of the state), in order to smear then Sen. Barack Obama, and later to rig the midterm elections in a way that would benefit Republicans.

Fox News is not a news channel. It is not a tabloid newspaper. It is not yellow journalism or a partisan newsletter. It is a clearinghouse for character assassination, hate-speech and the rigid programming of the American conservative mind. It is the number one responsible party for finalizing the mind-meld between the ever more feeble conservative mindset and the ever more masterful free-marketeer rhetoritician. In other words, it is a weapon of people who want to rig markets to benefit the wealthy for co-opting conservatism as their allegedly “legitimate” home in the American media.

Glen Beck’s deranged ramblings, his deliberate distortions and his relentless assault on the character of decent people who are working hard to leave a more just world to our children than the one we entered into, suggest a pathological obsession with undoing the great victories of American history. Why lie about fascism and the Holocaust, if one wants to celebrate that great triumph of American ideals over evil? Why lie about one of the world’s foremost and most committed champions of democracy, if one loves democracy?

Glen Beck has very little of substance to say, which is why we never hear anything of substance from him in any media forum. Fox News and right-wing radio give him a forum, but his comments are more the shrill prerequisites of those fora than they are any substantive commentary on the direction of American life or society. He is drab and weary footnote to our doldrums, and a stain on the very idea of a free and independent media.

Another way to put it is that when a media figure is so beholden to bias and defamation, he is not in any way free, and he cannot in any way represent a free and independent press. He consumes airtime that could be devoted to more constructive examinations of fact and theory, that could be used by other more imaginative, more concerned, more noble spirits, to actually do the work assigned to our press: that of finding out the truth, wherever it may lie.

When a media figure, a network, a major multinational corporation, spends so much time obscuring the truth and distorting the facts, it is eroding the freedom of the press and of the American people whose freedom that press embodies. When lies of this magnitude are tolerated as “interpretation” or “commentary”, it is a clear sign that an institution has reached a total moral flatline, that all semblance of moral reason or judicious intellect have been eroded to nil and the enterprise is reaching a theshold of maximum hubris and unconcern with the results of its actions.

We in the media, in the body politic, in the human realm, who wish to uphold the interests of democracy, of reason, of justice and equality, of journalistic standards and of free and fair elections, must undertake to boycott and to marginalize Fox News as is appropriate to its obsessive  fringe-leaning behavior. The network is carving out its own niche on the very edge of sane human discourse, and it should be relegated to that place it has chosen, not celebrate as one of so many mainstream news networks.

American democracy is only as strong as the minds and the moral compasses of we the people, we who inhabit that space where American democracy is meant to be the rule. If we relent in our defense of reason, in our demand for justice, in our right to know the truth, if we relent in our standards of forthright informed discourse, we forfeit our freedoms and hand power to petty tyrants.

It is time for the unrecognized majority of sane Americans, the cooperative mass of mainstream citizens, involved in their communities and willing to break bread with those who differ on the fine points of policy, to cast off the rabid ideology of Fox News, and open a new dawn for American discourse, one in which we start from fact, and move constructively through dialogue and well-intentioned adversarial discourse, to policy choices that are democratic in nature and in process and which serve our common interest as free people who wish the same for our children.

The vicious, at times shameful, elections of 2010, full of more vitriol and more defamatory ads than any in memory, flush with record sums of corporate spending, and in an environment of deep economic malaise, have given the Republicans control of the House of Representatives, while Democrats retain control of the Senate. Rep. John Boehner of Ohio is the presumptive Speaker of the House for the next Congress, the third highest Constitutional role in US government.

Republicans are calling it a “wave election”, like those that favored the Democrats in 2006 or 2008. In many ways, it was that. Republicans swept to power in the House of Representatives, despite the massive margin enjoyed by Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic majority. In fact, the Republicans appear to have reversed the massive majority. Analysts now question, however, whether they will have to change strategies, politically, and work with Pres. Obama, without whose signature they can do nothing and whose signature they can only hope to get if the Senate agrees to their plans.

A split Congress is considered by many a sign that “gridlock” will be the hallmark of the 2011-2012 Congress, following on the most intense and relentless obstruction (especially in the Senate) ever seen. Obama has, however, been accused of being “soft” for having taken so conciliatory an approach, in hopes of courting Republican support, and nevertheless passed one of the most ambitious legislative agendas, despite record obstruction in the Senate.

That combination of conciliatory negotiation and determined drive to do the people’s business, reforming the economy so it can be turned around and eventually get back to creating jobs, may allow Obama a window of opportunity, to work with the new House majority to achieve measures that will actually create jobs.

Welfare reform has been done, and No Child Left Behind as well; Republicans cannot ask for any more cuts to vital social spending, without offending all the families whose children are in school or whose incomes are faltering. Democrats have had a terrible struggle on their hands to get unemployment benefits extended for the millions left unemployed by the Bush recession or to get tax relief for small businesses that want to hire.

Perhaps surprising to anyone who has taken at face value the vicious attacks on Democratic “tax and spend” policies, Pres. Obama and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have spent much of the last two years passing major tax relief for the middle class and for small businesses, specifically rewarding or incentivizing job creation, over the strident across-the-board objections of Republicans.

That strategy will not work, now that the Republicans have part of the responsibility of governing. A budget proposal will have to not only contain real numbers, it will have to be viable, both as a matter of law and as an administrative strategy for a United States government with bloated defense and prescription drug spending, owing to Republican policies.

A failure to reach a budget agreement with the Democratic Senate and the White House could mean a “government shutdown”, which some Tea Party radicals erroneously view with excitement as a potential sign they are “shrinking the government”. But a shutdown of the government, in a bad economic climate in which an eloquent, hard-working president seeks to reform the economy to correct for his Republican predecessor’s mistakes, would be bad for the Republican cause, as it was for then Speaker Newt Gingrich, when he misread the political winds of the 1994 “wave”, and wound up discredited, handing Pres. Clinton a huge election victory in 1996.

The split Congress may be less a vote of confidence for Republicans and more a market signal to both parties, in the market of ideas that is, that the people want a politics of compromise, by which both parties struggle together for the good of the country. For two years, the two major parties have been struggling against one another; for the next two, they will have to struggle together, or stumble together, and Pres. Obama, as serious a man as has held the office in a generation, is sure to distinguish sharply between bills that warrant a signature and bills that warrant a veto.

Pennsylvania’s new Republican senator Pat Toomey, considered by many a hard-line right-wing radical, said in his victory speech last night that he “would like to extend a hand to Pres. Obama”, reminding his crowd of supporters that “He is not our opponent; he is our president”. He then pledged to work with anyone in either party who would advance the interests of small businesses and job creation, which the president is already doing.

John Boehner’s House Republicans would do well to hear Toomey’s call as well, or they will be labeled with the same derisive tone that has accompanied the phrase “House Republicans” ever since Newt Gingrich fell out of favor with the wider body politic (between the government shutdown, the impeachment process and the flagrant corruption of the early 2000s). Only this time, prolonged joblessness will make the derision that much more intense and the people’s patience that much less.